River Habitats for Coarse Fish: How Fish Use Rivers and How We Can Help Them

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Dr. Mark Everard. River Habitats for Coarse Fish: How Fish Use Rivers and How We Can Help Them

River Habitats for Coarse Fish

Contents

River Habitats for Coarse Fish: An Introduction

How Coarse Fish Use River Habitats

Life cycles of British freshwater fishes

Fish migration

Spawning habitats

Gravel spawners

Vegetation spawners

Hard substrate spawners

Exceptions to these spawning habitats

Nursery habitats

Refuge habitats

Feeding habitat

Habitat diversity

Bottlenecks and Pressures

Naturalness

Loss of connectivity

Riparian habitat

Channel straightening, dredging and over-management

Taking Action

Influencing the multiple factors affecting fish stocks

Influencing water quality

Influencing water quantity

Influencing invasive species

Managing unbalanced predation

Influencing habitat

Relationships with regulators and other organisations

Taking account of what you have

Practical Fixes

Flexible fixes

Buffer zones

Willow kneeling

Live willow deflectors

Bank stabilisation

Restored spawning gravels

Spawning boards

Opening up bays and backwaters

Tree planting

Bypassing weirs

Spotting wider opportunities

All rivers are different

Why Fish Matter

Epilogue: Rivers with Ragged Edges

Acknowledgements

Appendices

Selected bibliography

Useful contact details

Index

Copyright

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How Fish Use Rivers and How We Can Help Them

Mark Everard

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This guide focuses primarily on the role of habitat in sustaining the life cycles of fish and supporting river health. From this initial overview, the guide then turns to practical measures that concerned anglers and angling organisations, fishery owners and rivers trusts, conservationists and conservation bodies, and the wider public can do to protect or improve river habitats for coarse fish.

This is because fish matter. You really don’t need to be a keen angler or a fish biologist to appreciate these often overlooked but iconic players in river ecosystems. This is because some fish species have direct conservation value, but is also because all fish species play important roles in the delicate balance of nature. This includes serving as prey for herons, kingfishers, otters and other, perhaps more charismatic (at least in the eyes of many of the general public), species within river ecosystems. Thriving fisheries also speak of healthy water, which is cheaper to treat on its way to our taps and safer to paddle and swim in, and of diverse ecotourism and other benefits to fishers and non-fishers like. So, when fish are absent, we all know instinctively that something is wrong.

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