Wessenden and Gorpley Natural Flood Management

Start date: 1 January 2018
End date: 31 December 2020
Funder: National Trust
Value: £94,500
Primary investigator: Professor Joseph Holden
Co-investigators: Dr Richard Grayson, Dr Megan Klaar

water@leeds are working at two sites, Wessenden and Gorpley, owned by the National Trust and Yorkshire Water to monitor the impacts of large scale Natural Flood Management (NFM) schemes.

The schemes have been funded through the West Yorkshire Combined Authority and aim to explore how NFM can reduce the risk of downstream flooding and include a combination of leaky dams (peat, turf, willow and stone), woodland planting and management, erosion control measures and fencing.

The monitoring has been designed to understand how these different interventions impact upon a range of processes and includes continuous in channel flow measurements, time-lapse photography to understand how NFM features operate through time, surveys to understand how interventions have affected channel and surface roughness, habitat surveys and routine suspended sediment sampling.