Weirs and the Backwards Ways that Rivers Work
One of my favourite sayings on river restoration is a mangled quote from a movie
"...boxing is an unnatural act. Everything in boxing is backwards: sometimes the best way to deliver a punch is to step backwards...but step back too far and you ain't fighting at all".
So my mangled version starts out "Everything in rivers is backwards...". Basically, I never seem to run out of new examples of "what SEEMS to happen in a river is actually the complete opposite of what really happens".
The rest of this article looks at many of the "backwards" things about weirs and rivers - and finishes off with a real-world case-study that is playing out right now on the River Dove.
One spoiler alert is that, from an ecological point of view, it is almost always safe to assume that:
The best biological outcome for a river is the removal of some or all of an artificial weir.
Now, I don't expect you to believe that…
"...boxing is an unnatural act. Everything in boxing is backwards: sometimes the best way to deliver a punch is to step backwards...but step back too far and you ain't fighting at all".
So my mangled version starts out "Everything in rivers is backwards...". Basically, I never seem to run out of new examples of "what SEEMS to happen in a river is actually the complete opposite of what really happens".
The rest of this article looks at many of the "backwards" things about weirs and rivers - and finishes off with a real-world case-study that is playing out right now on the River Dove.
One spoiler alert is that, from an ecological point of view, it is almost always safe to assume that:
The best biological outcome for a river is the removal of some or all of an artificial weir.
Now, I don't expect you to believe that…