River restoration in the Holme catchment

Drs Tory Milner and John Lever from the University of Huddersfield have been awarded £58,000 as part of a larger grant of £638,000 from the Landscape Recover scheme by DEFRA. The grant is in collaboration with South Pennies Park, River Holme Connections, and the Palladium Group. The Landscape Recovery scheme is a new environmental land management scheme that was introduced by the Government to increase the sustainability of agriculture through improving soils, increasing flood alleviation and water retention, and enhancing biodiversity, carbon storage and water quality.

Tory and John in collaboration with external partners will contribute to multiple river restoration proposals within the River Holme catchment, including peat restoration, improving fish migration by removing weirs, and riparian woodland management to reduce nutrient enrichments of headwaters.

As part of the project, Thomas Pagon, a new PhD student will be joining the School of Applied Sciences in October and will examine the ecological benefits of peatland restoration in headwater streams. Thomas will identify how different drainage dams affect physico-chemistry and benthic macroinvertebrates. The PhD project will also compare these variables pre and post installation of peat dams, timber dams, and coir log dams within artificial drainage networks. Thomas is being supervised by Tory, John and Thomas Smyth and is funded by DEFRA.