Recently Huw, Niall and Sandra went out with two new PhD students from Heriot Watt and their supervisors for a trip around some of our river and floodplain restoration sites on the Allan Water and its tributaries. Andrew and Maciej have both recently moved to Scotland from North America to begin their scholarships, and are being supervised by Ian Pattison, along with his colleagues Dan and Leo.
Andrew, who has recently moved from the U.S., will be looking at the spatial linkages between investments in Nature Based Solutions from the landowners upstream, and the people in the communities downstream who benefit from them. This will be of great help for the Trust as the MERLIN project gets into gear and we are able to begin the next phase of upscaling the works already carried out on the Allan Water. As a part of the MERLIN project, there will be greater analysis of the societal needs of the local communities in relation to natural flood management, and Andrew’s work in creating relationships and understanding between the landowners in these areas and the affected communities will be very useful. We have already begun to share contacts and information with Andrew so he can begin to reach out to people.
Maciej, who has come to Scotland from northern Canada, is going to be investigating the effectiveness of NBS, in relation to how it affects ecosystem service provision, and looking at how the effects of multiple NBS interventions combine together and affect the river system. During the visit we discussed some of the many types of monitoring that Maciej may be able to carry out, which will complement well the monitoring works that the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology will be enacting over the course of the MERLIN project.
It was a great day, with some very interesting conversations about our work and their upcoming projects. For more information on our work on the Allan Water, click here or contact project staff.
