This is an issue that’s kept UK-based river restorationists awake at night for years – but never with quite enough evidence to convince regulatory colleagues that toxic bioaccumulation of arsenic, mercury, PCBs, endocrine-disrupting flame retardants and other contaminants probably works the same at the apex of our inland waterways’ food webs as it does in [...]
Archive for the tag 'Urban runoff'
November 2 2012
Film night: Toxic bioaccumulation in post-industrial rivers… are urban fish safe to eat?
July 14 2012
Urban getaway: Winchester
With most of the Wandle running high, coloured and functionally un-fly-fishable for weeks (thanks to persistent pulses of urban runoff from surrounding square miles of roads, car parks and paved front gardens, to say nothing of randomly-clustered diesel and cooking oil spillages), one or two Wandle Piscators needed a break. So we took one …
July 11 2012
Urbantrout sidecasts: Wednesday 11 July
Urban flooding: UK government advisers point the finger at celebrity gardeners Double trouble for the Wandle: First red diesel, now cooking oil Revitalising urban rivers: Bella Davies, Angela Gurnell and Dave Webb talk to NERC in South London Trout in the distillery? Paul Gaskell dispenses wise habitat advice in Oban Big brown water on the Kelvin: [...]
April 26 2012
Riding the storm: River Chess gets extra STW capacity
Great news this morning from the River Chess in north west London, where Thames Water have just doubled the stormwater storage capacity of their Chesham sewage treatment works. The River Chess Association was formed in 2009 in direct response to local concerns about “black water” discharges from these works, whose headwater location often contributes more than [...]


