Beavers create complex wetland mosaics, creating ponds, canals, mires and braided streams, and coppicing trees like willow as aspen to maintain open grassland habitats within the mosaic. 

Norfolk Rivers Trust have created an innovative, natural treatment plant for over a million litres of water a day to help improve the quality of water that is returned to the River Ingol, one of Norfolk’s precious chalk streams.

The CaBA Biodiversity Pack focusses on the potential to restore natural processes, and the benefits this can have. It encourages practitioners to look to the restoration of natural ecosystem function when planning and delivering catchment projects, in order to make sustainable contributions to WFD and Biodiversity 2020 targets.

This policy work was led by WWF and had a focus on chalk streams: the crystal-clear, havens for wildlife rivers characteristic of southern and eastern England.

Keeping Rivers Cool was a four year (2012-2016) Environment Agency led climate change adaptation project, which focused on using trees to keep rivers cool.

Futurescapes is the RSPB’s UK-wide programme of landscape-scale conservation initiatives.

The “Citizen Crane” project is the Crane Catchment’s citizen science project, monitoring chemical and biological water quality.

Several organisations have now developed walk-over survey methodologies for locating sediment pollution in river catchments.

The River Habitat Survey is a methodology for recording habitat features for wildlife that was designed by the Environment Agency, England and Wales and has since been applied in many other countries.

While there is now a wealth of data sources available to help characterise our river catchments and prioritise where to start tackling issues, there is no substitute to getting out on the ground and undertaking a walkover survey to properly understand the local environment. 

Electrofishing is one of the most effective methods available to quantify, assess and monitor fish populations; within and between waterbodies.

One target system to diagnose the effects of contaminant exposure on organisms in the environment is to monitor biological damage by examining effects on their DNA.