BU Research Blog

Work on our fusion-funded co-creation and co-production project heats up in July as students get to work with our partners on our project ‘Fusing ecology, engineering and genetics to deliver sustainable river management’.

Working with the Environment Agency, the University of Insubria, Italy, we are investigating how river management strategies in the UK can be more sustainable in relation to river engineering and fishery management. This is important given river management focuses mainly on delivering socio-economic benefits (e.g. via flood defence) that are detrimental to fish communities (e.g. due to habitat loss). These impacts are usually mitigated by releasing (‘stocking’) high numbers of fish reared in captivity. There is, however, little consideration given on the fate and impact of these fish, providing the basis for our work.

Work to date has included our research assistant, Caterina Antognazza, collating samples and information to enable our student teams to run their genetic and ecological analyses, and engineering projects that designed sustainable engineering solutions to restore river habitats. Consequently, teams of placement students will very soon be commencing work in Italy and BU to determine the genetic and ecological impacts of fish stocking, with particular focus on whether the policy of stocking farmed fish has resulted in genetic impacts for fish populations at a regional level. We are also running a workshop very soon to bring together external stakeholders to discuss these issues. Given the expected fast pace of progress in the next five weeks, we’ll report back on our outputs by the end of July so watch this space!!

Caterina prepares the samples for the students.

– Rob Britton, Demetra Andreou, Ben Thomas