Catchment Management

This report covers control measures for 13 high or moderate impact, and one ‘alarm’ species on the UKTAG list that were not covered by the Aldridge report for Natural England. It draws information from published and unpublished literature, listed best  practices, technical reports, unpublished reports, project websites and expert knowledge. For each species, a report was written to present essential background information about the ecology and biology of the species. This is followed by a list of  invasion pathways and known techniques to limit further spread.

This report provides a broad assessment of the state of soil structure and drainage on commercial farms in four selected catchments during autumn/winter 2015/2016.  We describe the policy implications of the findings. Similar UK studies are used to discuss our results. This project was commissioned by SEPA and addresses its Land Protection objective “make links between soil management and water protection measures to ensure maximum benefit for both soil/land and water quality” (SEPA, 2015).

SEPA are proposing to adopt monitoring to show effectiveness of rural diffuse pollution measures in reducing FIO from a livestock catchment. This will draw from the recommendations in the CREW report “Monitoring guidance to assess the effectiveness of the Rural Diffuse Pollution Plan”.

Soil cultivation, manure / fertiliser applications and chemical spraying can all contribute to diffuse pollution from agricultural land.  Rainfall runoff from farm roads, tracks, yards and dusty roofs are also potential sources of diffuse pollution. Whilst many changes in farming practice have dealt with these sources of pollution there still remains instances where small amounts escape from a farmyard into a nearby ditch or where sediment laden overland field flows make their way into a ditch or burn, river or  natural wetland and finally the sea.