Stakeholders are vital to the success of all NFM projects. These can include a group, an organisation, a community or an individual. This topic brings together any material related to stakeholders such as stakeholder engagement principles and techniques, project management structures and information from intermediaries. It can also include a mix of experiences and lessons learnt from the view point of a stakeholder.
A short report of the Interreg Building with Nature Coordination meeting has been published by Sniffer. The Scottish Government hosted the coordination meeting in Dundee in September and delegates had the opportunity to visit Eddleston, Montrose and St. Andrews NFM projects. A link to the workshop report can be found below.
Stroneslaney Farm Riparian Tree Planting Projects main aim was to boost riparian trees along the River Balvaig within the floodplain. Currently, the river lacks riparian tree cover which is suspected to be due to deer populations and livestock limiting natural regeneration in the area. This means that there is a lack of new trees growing to fill the gaps of older trees coming to the end of their life along the river.
The Rottal Burn in the South Esk Catchment was re-meandered in 2012. During the project 1100m of new channel plus backwaters was created, connection to wetlands was established, and 2000 native trees were planted.
An open access book is now available online which provides lots of best practice examples of sustainable river management. "Riverine Ecosystem Management: Science for Governing Towards a Sustainable Future" aims to be of interest to a range of readers from scientists to practitioners. For more information on the book please refer to the link below.
The Building with Nature (BwN) project (funded by EU Interreg) has produced a short video to explain the project. The Scottish Government, SEPA and Tweed Forum are partners on the project and are focused on the 'catchments' workpackage (the Eddleston catchment is a case study site in the project).
The Environment Agency, CIRIA and other partners are hoping to develop technical guidance on specific Natural Flood Management measures. To begin with they have created a short scoping survey. This is your opportunity to contribute to this survey.
The survey is accessible via the link below and will close towards the end of June.
The work aimed to create a mosaic of river and floodplain habitats by allowing active river processes to develop a multi-threaded (anabranched) system together with floodplain wet woodland features. Prior to the work, the burn was a degraded perched watercourse and flowed around the edge of a field, with dredged spoil deposits used to build the flood embankments, thus disconnecting the burn from its floodplain area.
In 2010 a large scale dune restoration project was completed at West Sands Beach, St Andrews. Due to the location of the site in the SAC, it’s designation within an SSSI and Natura 2000 site; all work had to ensure conservation objectives were met. Preliminary work to determine and map the sediment patterns and grain size distributions within the dunes and intertidal area was crucial to the long term viability and success of the project. A “donor” site was identified that could withstand periodic sediment extraction without suffering long term consequences.
In 2016 a Natural Flood Management Handbook was published by SEPA. This comprehensive document provides an overview to Natural Flood Management. Lead author, Heather Forbes, Senior Policy Officer in SEPA’s Flood Risk Management team, said: