fisheries reports and project reports

Our annual fisheries reports are the result of months of hard work. Each year our dedicated team of fisheries scientists embark on an epic three-month long electrofishing project. Surveying over three hundred sites across the Ribble catchment, they are responsible collecting a huge amount of data. The data we collect helps us to monitor fish numbers and in turn helps us to monitor the success of the schemes that the Trust has undertaken.

Ribble Rivers Trust have one of the largest databases of this kind in England as our data goes so far back it shows patterns over time. As a result, we’re seeing a clear relationship between extreme winter floods (when fish eggs are vulnerable to wash out) and low numbers of young fish in subsequent years. This shows that it is likely that declining fish numbers are, at least in part, caused by extreme weather events. Given that climate change increases the frequency of these events we know that in order to protect our fish populations we need to reduce the impact of these floods and try and decrease their regularity.