RIVER GOIL
HABITAT IMPROVEMENT PROJECT – TREE PLANTING (28/03/15)
First of all,
a big thanks to all the volunteers for coming along on a rainy Saturday.
Despite the wet conditions, the turn up was excellent. There were 12 enthusiastic
people on the ground planting 175 trees along the main river and
making brush bundles ready to be placed in the straighten
tributaries.
The river
Goil is a spate river surrounded by steep hills covered mainly
by commercial forest along the hill sides and grazing land on the
floodplain area.
The first
phase of the habitat improvement projects on the river Goil (November 2014), was an erection
of a fence and planting of 75 trees. The trees are growing
successfully but more work needed to be done in order to improve fish habitat
and recover natural geomorphological processes of the river.
The second
phase of the project was a more intense planting (175
trees). This makes a total of 250 trees on the ground ready
to grow and stabilise the eroded banks. Native trees are vital features in
the river habitat. They bring multiple benefits to the ecosystem, such as:
· Food supply
for fish through terrestrial invertebrates that live on them;
· Trees provide
shade reducing the temperature fluctuation of the water;
· They also
provide cover for fish and other wildlife dependent on them;
· They stabilise
the banks with their root network and trap fine sediments when the flood
event occurs;
· It is
important to have trees on the river banks so they can become large
woody debris, also beneficial for the in-stream habitat.
This is an
on-going project. We expect to do more work in the near future tackling
exacerbated bank erosion through soft engineering techniques. We will keep
you posted.
Finally, we
would like to thank, once again, to all volunteers for their hard work (Goil
Angling Club members, friends and keen fishermen), and the farmer who gave us
his permission to fence the land and work on the riparian buffer zone.
River Goil before tree planting.
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 Goil Angling Club volunteers.
Happy faces.
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Team work.
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Excellent progress.
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Installation of stakes and
shelterguards around the tree.
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Tree planting on the island.
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Collecting brush from the
felled forest nearby.
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Cutting brush bundles to the
same size.
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Making even piles.
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Packing brush bundles together.
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