The way that rural land is managed, both in terms of the vegetative cover and the underlying soil, can greatly influence the pathways and speed by which incident rainfall reaches watercourses. Good land and soil management practices can help to minimise the generation of surface runoff and reduce downstream flood risk. Land and soil management for NFM involves cultivating soils to promote a good macro-structure and good organic matter content, thereby increasing soil infiltration and reducing surface flow generation and associated sediment transport. Surface water flooding is usually associated with heavy rainfall falling on impermeable surfaces, dry (capped) soils, frozen soils, or on a saturated catchment, causing overland flow to occur. This rainfall induced overland flow is quickly transferred to channels across the surface of the landscape due to the limited potential for soil infiltration. There is a consequent rapid rise in channel levels and a flashy catchment response to the rainfall. This high energetic flow of water across the landscape can result in erosion to soil and the transport of sediments (and sediment associated pollutants). Runoff management measures target these flow pathways, disconnecting them thereby attenuating the flow.
The Eddleston Water project won two awards at the Chartered Institute of Ecology & Environmental Management's 2023 Awards ceremony in Birmingham on 28th June. Competing against a wealth of other excellent projects, Tweed Forum and its partners' study of the effectiveness of natural flood management won the CIEEM Best Practice Award for Large-Scale Practical Nature Conservation.
The terms restoration and nature-based solutions are both commonly used these days, and sometimes used interchangeably. But are they identical?
The Environment Agency have commissioned Qa Research to research NFM training needs amongst people with a role in NFM in England. The Environment Agency wants to ensure that everyone involved in NFM has the skills, knowledge and expertise they need. Therefore this survey has been constructed to understand where there is a need for training for those who have a role in NFM to inform the development and availability of suitable training.
Peatland ACTION has recently launched a suite of films to help encourage more landowners to get involved in peatland restoration, and promote the value of the work that peatland contractors do to make that happen. The films can be accessed via a dedicated YouTube channel (via link below). There are a series of films which cover topics such as the land managers' view, about peatland contractors and also case study examples.
The Scottish FRM2023 Conference took place in Perth in February this year. The topic of the conference was "Water Resilient Places". It was a 2-day conference which over 200 people attended (both in person and online). There were 59 speakrs and a number of workshops. A theme of one session was on Nature-Based Solutions (inc. NFM). All the slides and videos of the presentations are now available on Sniffer's website (see link below). They have a dedicated Vimeo channel hosting the session recordings.
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 13th 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
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.
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".