History

Baseline monitoring work begins in three Leicestershire catchments: the Barky Brook, the Eye Brook and the Stonton Brook.

The aim of this work is to ensure that the results of any future monitoring work can be compared with results from before measures are introduced.

Water Friendly Farming officially launches as a three-year project.

It is led by Freshwater Habitats Trust (then called Pond Conservation) and the Allerton Project of the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust, supported by a range of partners, including the Environment Agency and Syngenta.

Water Friendly Farming is described as: “a research demonstration project designed to test the effectiveness of landscape-wide mitigation measures that are used to reduce the impact of rural land use on streams, ponds, lakes and rivers, without impinging on the profitability of farm businesses.”

The first project update is published.

It includes the results and practical implications of the first three years of Water Friendly Farming.

The results of the first six years’ of Water Friendly Farming are published.

The report also acknowledges the growing problem of water pollution and our changing knowledge of how to  protect freshwaters.

Water Friendly Farming and captures the attention of the media and scientific community when results from the project are published.

The paper, published in journal Biological Conservation, found that creating clean-water ponds in the farmed countryside can dramatically increase levels of freshwater biodiversity, protecting our fragile ecosystems, and almost trebling the number of rare plant species.

Lead author Penny Williams from Freshwater Habitats Trust said, “The gains we saw are unprecedented for freshwater and are, by a long way, the largest recorded improvements in freshwater diversity seen from adding land management measures to countryside landscapes.

“Our previous work had already shown that ponds were a secret treasure in the British countryside – with a value out of proportion to their tiny size – however the scale of benefits from adding new ponds took all of us by surprise.”

A new project is launched to test some of the Water Friendly Farming results in a new site in Northamptonshire.

Led by Freshwater Habitats Trust and funded by Anglian Water and the Environment Agency, Pitsford Water Friendly Farming builds on the success of Water Friendly Farming in two catchments: the Walgrave and the Scaldwell.