News

The Eddleston Water project, Tweed Forum and Scottish Government's long-running empirical study of the effectiveness of Natural Flood Management (NFM) has just been designated by UNESCO as one of their new Ecohydrology Demonstration sites, becoming the first one in the UK to achieve this recognition. The project is in its 13^th year of operation and will now be included as a Demonstration Site in the UNESCO Intergovernmental Hydrological Programme (IHP), part of the intergovernmental UN system that’s dedicate

The Helping Nature strand is now open for Expessions of Interest, which must be submitted by Monday 6 March 2023.

NatureScot invite protects requesting a grant of £25k - £250k to be delivered over a maximum of two years.

The priorities under freshwater restoration are listed below:

A focus review paper on mitigating floods and attenuating surface runoff with temporary storage areas (TSAs) in headwaters has been published in the journal WIRES (Wiley Interdiciplinary Reviews) Waters. TSAs represent a category of soft-engineered nature-based solutions that can provide dispersed, small-scale storage throughout a catchment.  Measures include e.g., bunds, offline ponds and leaky barriers. This open access paper focuses on the role of relatively small-scale (<10,000 m3) TSAs in headwater catchments for flood risk management. 

A report has been produced by the Environment Agency that evaluates their Natural Flood Management programme. Between 2017 and 2021, £15 million of government funding was invested in 60 pilots across England. The report looks at 4 phases of NFM project lifecycle; a) Partnership working, b) Valuing benefits and project assessment, c) Project implementation and d) monitoring and sustaining the benefits. 

Are you interested in researching natural flood management? We're currently advertising a PhD focussed on land use change and natural flood management at the Eddleston NFM pilot site in the Scottish Borders. A great opportunity for someone with a background in geoscience, geography, engineering or related areas, as well as an interest in fieldwork, to work at one of the UK's longest running NFM pilot sites! For more information please visit the IAPETUS2 doctoral training programme at the link provided.

Scottish Government's Eddleston Water project was Highly Commended in the annual Nature of Scotland Awards in Edinburgh last month. Project Managers, Tweed Forum, along with partners in SEPA, Dundee university and BGS joined other colleagues at the ceremony which recognised the impact of thir long-running study of the effectiveness of NFM measures to reduce flood risk and improve riparian habitats at the catchment scale.

The Eddleston Water study has just produced its second comprehensive report, covering work upto 2021. Building on the earlier 2016 report, as well as published papers in the intervening period, this brings together key results since 2010 across all areas of monitoring and modeling of the effectiveness of Natural Flood Management (NFM) measures that have been implemented across the 69km2 catchment in the Scottish Borders. This includes planting over 330,000 native trees, creating 115 high-flow log-structures, remeandering 3.5km of channel and creating 38 flood storage ponds.

A paper has just been published in the international journal, Water focussing on lessons learned from 12 years of monitoring of Scottish Government’s Eddleston Water study. The paper reviews the monitoring strategy and assesses how the monitoring networks developed meet its strategic aims, and what and why subsequent changes have been made in monitoring design and implementation.

The Forestry Commission, Scottish Forestry, Natural Resources Wales and Northern Ireland Forest Service have published a new UK-wide guide outlining how our forests and woodlands can reduce the damaging effects and financial impact of flooding on vulnerable communities. Woodlands can play a key role in flood mitigation and make an important contribution to reducing downstream flood risk.

A new open access book entitled “Spatial Flood Risk Management: Implementing Catchment-based Retention and Resilience on Private Land” has been published. Centralising the role of land and landowners, the book brings together knowledge from socio-economy, public policy, hydrology, geomorphology, and engineering to establish an interdisciplinary knowledge base on spatial approaches to managing flood risks. It contains chapters from over 25 different European authors and is an output from the EU funded COST action "Natural Flood Retention on Private Land".