Assessing the Importance of Small Stream Ecosystems

1. Ensure best practice survey/ questionnaire design from the Office for National Statistics - to meet project milestones, we need to carry out a questionnaire survey and issue a data request on the impact of rewilding of water courses on fish/ salmonids in the UK. As a Government Agency we need to ensure best-practice design, layout and construction of the survey/ questionnaire. We had not originally budgeted for this work. The most efficient way to complete this task was to sub-contract the Office for National Statistics.

2. Provide additional modelling work on flows and salmonids - original milestones relied on salmonid data available from the Environment Agency. However, we are now also collaborating with Queen Mary College, University of London (QMUL) and the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust (GWCT). GWCT have provided us with much more spatially comprehensive data than that available from the EA, from sampling programmes in catchments of interest to our study, including extensive data for the River Frome and additional data for the Welsh Dee. We were also alerted to the existence of supplementary flow data from Natural Resources Wales, from gauging stations not within the National River Flow Archive. We are working closely with GWCT and QMUL to ensure consistency across methods for analysing relationships between salmonid populations and river flow. This collaboration, along with the enhanced data provided, will allow us to perform more detailed analyses of a wider range of criteria, which will deliver added value and be highly applicable to the Defra Catchment Based Approach policy framework. In addition, new modelling opportunities provided by an enhanced catchment model (ECM+) would greatly enhance further analysis given the detailed calibration with monitoring data that this model provides.

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