Upper Spey River Restoration Project

foreign I'm the project officer for the spay catchment initiative and this is the upper spay and it's a project to do some restoration work here on Grand Shiro estate we have a lot of wildlife here at Glen Sherry and we have a lot of wading Birds including oyster catchers and lap Wings we've got Birds of Prey including golden eagles and of course we have Atlantic salmon feel that this project is very important in the country estate it benefits the river the lands around it and most importantly the wildlife within it so we chose this location for Habitat restoration and because there's a lack of bankside vegetation and trees here and we know now that that's really important factor for keeping the river in good condition and providing the right kind of habitat so what we're doing here is putting what we call large wood structures into the river which are fell trees with the root plates attached and they're mimicking the function of natural dead wood falling into the river which has multiple effects but one of the main ones we were looking for here was improving the habitat for fish it also creates changes in flow pattern so that we move away from our monocultured system of water traveling through this environment it's broken up there are places where it's deeper cooler so you create more environments for entomology to survive so collectively there's quite a wide range of benefits by putting these structures in so funding's always a major factor in doing projects like this and in this case the project was funded through nature Scots nature restoration fund it's ideally set up for doing this kind of project and we couldn't have done it without that source of funding this project has been a great example of collaboration between gfg and Johanna spay fishery boards the spay catchment initiative sepa to work together to the greater benefits of everyone and nature around here we're hoping to see some positive changes really quickly in fact just a few months after the large Woody structures were installed we can already see pools and gravel deposits forming around them we'd like to see that continuing so we can get really good quality habitat in the river and ideally within the next decade we'd expect to see a big increase in the number of juvenile salmoned fish so salmon and trout being produced from this area but also to see benefits to the other life in the river including the invertebrate population and that increasing and yeah General Improvement in the landscape and the habitat quality in and around the river the success of this project is largely down to working with partners and I suppose the one essential partner that the job could not have got done without is Johanna Island Estates whose ground were on here and who've been really really supportive all the way through in terms particularly of giving us access to the sites and supplying the trees to form the large Woody structures so if anybody did want to find out more about this project and how it progresses or on social media space catchment initiative and there's also information about this and our other projects on our website which is spaycatchment.org [Music] foreign

Channel: Spey Catchment Initiative

Views: 10,807

Keywords:

Id: tjFRAah4YCc

Length: 4min 15sec (255 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 04 2023