Wye & Usk Foundation staff conducting barrier impact surveys on the River Honddu (Usk tributary) as part of the June bootcamp.
Afonydd Cymru are delighted to be a partner of a £500,000 project launched in April 2022 to ease fish migration in five famous Welsh salmon rivers.
The 17-month project is led by Swansea University and funded by the Nature Networks Fund, which is funded by the Welsh Government and administered by the National Lottery Heritage Fund in Wales. It will remove 17 barriers in the Eastern and Western Cleddau, the Usk, Tywi and Teifi, reconnecting 141km of river in total.
Reconnecting good quality habitats for salmon make populations less isolated and therefore more resilient to future change.
And it is not just salmon that benefit. Many other aquatic species such as the freshwater pearl mussel, sea trout, sea lamprey, white-clawed crayfish, and the European otter require free-flowing rivers and are negatively affected by barriers.
Other partners in the project include West Wales Rivers Trust, The Wye & Usk Foundation, Afan Valley Angling Club, Welsh Water and Natural Resources Wales.
In June 2022 a two-day “Barrier Removal Bootcamp” was hosted by the Wye & Usk Foundation in Talgarth, near Brecon for the project’s partners. It included hands-on training on barrier monitoring using the Barrier Tracker app, barrier impact assessment and surveys on habitat, macroinvertebrates, sediment assessment, and collection of water samples for eDNA monitoring.
We look forward to providing updates of this valuable project as it progresses.