River Restoration Update

After storm Claudia, the media has been full of worrying images and videos of a country underwater, a sudden deluge of rainfall on a drought ridden and degraded landscape has led to flash flooding around the country. As clear a call for landscape scale nature restoration as you will ever see.

At Boothby Wildland earlier this year we commenced the first phase of restoration on our section of the West Glen River (phase 2 will be delivered by the beavers who arrive later this winter). These interventions have been about reconnecting the river with its floodplain and slowing the flow of water, giving it space to occupy a wider area and holding back the flow with a series of Beaver Dam Analogues (leaky dams).

With flash floods across the district, when we arrived on site at the weekend our first port of call was the road that goes over the West Glen River as is leaves the Wildland. This road and adjacent property are on the floodplain and have flooded numerous times in recent winters, especially during high rainfall events like Storm Claudia. Very excitingly, what we found was a fast-running river but no flooding from the West Glen; our interventions upstream appear to have absorbed a huge volume of water. For context our onsite weather station recorded a phenomenal 87.38mm of rainfall on Friday 14th November.

An event like this at the beginning of the winter and after such a dry period really enables our semi-restored ‘wet valley bottom’ to do its finest, charging the aquifer, water tables and slowing the flow.

We know that now the ground is saturated the restoration work alone won’t stop all future flood events (the road crosses the floodplain after all!). The beavers have their work cut out to store more and more water across Boothby (our models indicate they will deliver 5 x more water storage and reduce peak flows by 35% – 40%, on top of the interventions already complete) but seeing the glorious and instant impact of this nature-based solution in action sent us singing into the weekend.

We will be crunching numbers over the winter from our flow gauges and weather stations to bring the numbers and evidence behind a story of recovery that is best seen to be believed.