Yesterday (March 19th) Chris Short, and Dr Angie Elwin from the University of Reading conducted a webinar as part of the Landwise project concerning the integration of local knowledge into Natural Flood Management (NFM) work.
The Landwise project is looking at how effective land-based NFM measures (such as woodland planting, changes to land and soil management and woody dams) may be at reducing the risk from flooding from surface runoff, rivers and groundwater in groundwater-fed lowland catchments. Integrating local knowledge with technical field and modelling work is a key feature of the project.
Chris and Angie focused how they brought together local stakeholders with knowledge on current land use and management to find out which types of NFM measures they believe are acceptable (both culturally or socially) and feasible in certain landscape areas across the West Thames area. They presented preliminary findings from a recent farmer knowledge survey and from a series of NFM scenario building workshops. They then outlined how outputs will be used to create catchment scale scenarios for modelling experiments to look at how land-based NFM could affect flood risk. Finally they shared some learning on their top tips for stakeholder engagement concerning NFM.
Slides and audio from the webinar can be found here: Webinar recordings on NERC website.
