EUROPE’S RIVERS ARE BROKEN, BUT THERE IS A FIX
PRESS RELEASE
EUROPE’S RIVERS ARE BROKEN, BUT THERE IS A FIX
A new study published in Nature reveals the true extent of river fragmentation
and offers some solutions
Thursday, 17th of December 2020: Research stemming from AMBER, a large collaborative Horizon 2020 project coordinated by Swansea University, has found that Europe’s rivers have at least 1.2 million instream barriers. The results published today in Nature (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-3005-2) show that Europe has probably some of the most fragmented rivers in the world. The study detected thousands of large dams, but also a myriad of low-head structures such as weirs, culverts, fords, sluices and ramps which had been overlooked and are the main culprits of fragmentation.
Europe's Main River Basins
Using barrier modelling and extensive field ground-truthing, the study estimated that there are least 0.74 barriers per km of stream, and produced the first comprehensive pan-European barrier inventory, the AMBER Barrier Atlas. “The extent of river fragmentation in Europe is much higher than anyone had anticipated”, says Barbara Belletti, a river geomorphologist who led the study at Politecnico di Milano and is now at CNRS, the French National Centre for Scientific Research.
“Many barriers are obsolete and removing them provides unprecedented opportunities for restoration”, says Carlos de Garcia de Leaniz, AMBER’s coordinator; “our results feed directly into the new EU Biodiversity Strategy and will help to reconnect at least 25,000 km of Europe’s rivers by 2030”.
“To date, Inland Fisheries Ireland (IFI) has surveyed 19,200 in stream structures and identified 2,500 barriers to fish passage in Irish catchments. Free flowing rivers are healthy rivers and barrier removal is a simple tool to restore fish species, increasing their resilience in these times of change.” Says Dr Cathal Gallagher, Head of Research and Development at Inland Fisheries Ireland.
ENDS
For media information:
Sadhbh O’Neill
Communications Assistant
Inland Fisheries Ireland
E: sadhbh.oneill@fisheriesireland.ie
T: 01 8842632/ 087 101 9998
Note to Editors
AMBER has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under Grant Agreement 689682.
AMBER seeks to apply adaptive management to the operation of dams and other barriers to achieve a more sustainable use of water resources and a more efficient restoration of stream connectivity. The project has developed tools and simulations to help water companies and river managers maximize the benefits of barriers and minimize ecological impacts. AMBER’s main outcomes include
- Three policy briefs
- Improved fish migration at the Poutès Dam in France using adaptive management strategies
- The removal of unused weirs in the UK, Spain and Denmark
- Several river restoration decision support tools
- The Let It Flow magazine to share research, outcomes, and the vision to reconnect rivers
- Over 25 peer-reviewed publications
- The Barrier Tracker - the first citizen science app to record river barriers across Europe
All AMBER outputs are freely available and can be downloaded from the project website (www.amber.international)
