Land and water management workshop in Morland

A big thank you for everyone who attended the recent workshop held in October at Morland village hall. 

At this meeting we introduced the Eden Demonstration Test Catchment and pilot Environmental Virtual Observatory projects by showing examples of the live data being collected in the Morland area and a demo of the visualisation tool being developed using some of this data. The live data available includes rainfall, river level, water quality and webcam images. There was a lot of interest in the water quality data, particularly how water quality in the Beck relates to water quality elsewhere and whether there were water quality problems. There was also interest in understanding better the losses of nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen to the river from the farmland.

The visualisation tool demo showed an example of how we could bring together live data from different sources in the river Eden to let the user view web cam images simultaneously with river flow or water colour information. For the second part of the demo we discussed the development of a land use and flood risk tool. The idea behind this tool is to consider how flood risk may be altered by changing land use or land management. This tool would simulate the water level in a river and therefore possible flood risk using measured rainfall and landscape characteristics which affect how the water runs off the land such as the soils, vegetation and use of water-retaining features such as ponds. We discussed possible scenarios of how land use might change in the future, as we want your help in devising these scenarios. We are now working on three of the scenarios we discussed, these are current farming practices, runoff management and farming and farming with some increased woodland, if you have ideas for others, please let us know.

 
Our plans for the next 6 months are to continue to develop the demo visualisation tool based on some of the things we discussed at the meeting, including potentially adding in data and simulations of water quality variables such as nutrients and sediment. We hope to be able to demonstrate it to you at a later meeting and/or by sending you an internet link to the demo, so you can try it out for yourself. We are really keen to get your feedback and opinions as part of the work and we would welcome your questions, comments and thoughts on the project in the comments below.

What is the Eden EVOp about?

The Eden EVOp is part of a national pilot project called the Environmental Virtual Observatory. The idea of this project is to combine numerous sources of environmental information such as data sets, models and knowledge into one web-based platform accessible to everyone from an interested citizen to a scientist or decision maker. An important part of this project involves talking to local communities about what environmental issues they think are important and getting help in designing a landscape visualisation tool for the Morland area in the river Eden, which can be used to learn about the local environment, share knowledge and eventually help make better environmental decisions. In this pilot project we are particularly interested in your views on flooding and water pollution.

Our project is working alongside The River Eden Demonstration Test Catchment (Eden DTC) project. The purpose of this project is to develop a large-scale research platform to test measures for reducing diffuse pollution from agriculture. A lot of information about the local environment is being collected as part of this project and the The Eden DTC website displays live data showing river levels, web cams images, rainfall information and water quality data which we hope to use in the Environmental Virtual Observatory pilot.