Jack Murfield, a Biology student from Sheffield Hallam University, teamed up with the Environment Agency (partner of Connected by Water) to conduct his final year project.
Read below about what he investigated and how working with a partnership enhanced his work.
For my final year project, I wanted to do more than just simply write about a topic. I wanted to see how my own work can make an actual difference. Partnering with the Connected by Water team and the Environment Agency (EA) gave me a chance to study how leaky dams affect local environments, not just through reading scientific articles, but using scientific methods to see it in practice. Through site visits, data analysis and conversations with experts, I looked into the balance between protecting wildlife and managing floods for communities. In this blog, I will share what the project involved, what I learned from working with the EA, and why it changed how I see environmental science.
The research I conducted was focused on studying how sediment deposition found at the leaky dams affected biodiversity in the area. This area of research was of some interest to me when I first started the project, but as I started the research, I found out how much I actually enjoyed the area of research.
This type of research matters significantly, especially now due to climate change. The dams were put in place to manage flood risk in the Sheffield area, and if the dams negatively impacted the ecology it would be risky to the environment. Before starting any form of site visits I had multiple conversations with experts in the EA to try and provide me with any resources that would be useful to my research they also gave me more knowledge about the area.
Once I got a better understanding of the area and background from the EA, they provided me with a site visit so I could see what I would be researching. They were extremely helpful in providing me with detailed information about the dams, such as when they were put in place and where they were.
After the initial visit, I resourced a few pieces of equipment from Sheffield Hallam University to use for the research. Although the methods I was going to use were much more meant for the field, the equipment was more designed for laboratory conditions, I still made use of the equipment I had.
After that, I conducted many site visits to gain data over a four week period, with the first 3 weeks being sediment and river analysis with repetitions, and the final week looking into the biodiversity of the river. If the research was conducted in the Spring-time, I would have been able to look into plants as well but this was not possible.
The sediment analysis itself involved looking into the different types of sediment such as sand, silt and clay, as well as looking at the different types of sedimentary rocks, as I thought these would have an effect on biodiversity to some degree.
The biodiversity was analysed using a net and a tray, this method is called kick sampling, as it involves agitating the river bed to draw out aquatic invertebrates. These were then counted and released back into the river safely.
The two images shown here are of the tray after I added the contents from the net, and then the sampling dish I used to accurately count the invertebrates. As shown, the invertebrates come in all shapes and varieties, including shrimps. After taking this data back to the computer I found that these were all signs of a healthy river.
Some parts of the river were deprived of a large variety of organisms, mostly showing aquatic worms, this was because there was high heavy metal content in the river.
After all of the data was collected and added to a spreadsheet, I performed many different statistical calculations in order to work out correlation and to see any trends that were present. The spreadsheet ended up being quite large towards the end of the project so to make it more readable I split it up into 4 different documents.
After these calculations were done, I found that more sediment deposition in the upstream of the dams lead to a single species dominating over the rest, showing a lower biodiversity. But an increased sediment deposition in the downstream lead to multiple species to thrive as oxygen is moved around much better.
I do hope that I am able to continue this research with the Environment Agency and the Connected by Water partnership in order to analyse the future trends of the dams, and to possibly design a better suited dam that can both aid in natural flood management and also support a high variety of life. I think a design that lets much smaller sediment into the lower catchment of dams should allow for a much more balanced variety of life.
Throughout this entire project the Environment Agency, the Sheffield and Rotherham Wildlife Trust and the Connected by Water partnership have provided me with so much help and provided invaluable information to support this work. I hope I can continue to aid them in improving their work with a biological perspective.