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- Loweswater Care Project 2007-2010
Following the positive outcome of the scoping study on Loweswater, the full project “Understanding and Acting within Loweswater: A Community Approach to Catchment Management” (which became better known as the Loweswater Care Project) was successful in getting full funding and ran from mid 2007 to the end of 2010.
This research project had 3 main objectives:
To create a mechanism that will enable community-stakeholder and institutional-stakeholder-involved decision making. The objective of this mechanism is to provide the basis for long-term ecological, economic and social sustainability within the Loweswater catchment.- To carry out high quality interdisciplinary research in order to produce a catchment knowledge-base to inform decision-making. This will include research on the ecology of land and water (including fish) in the catchment and studies of institutional regulation and management affecting Loweswater.
- Research and analysis into the ‘transferability’ of the approach proposed. The research aims to see, in other words, if the way that we are trying to bring local communities, institutional stakeholders and researchers of different disciplines together is beneficial. If so, we want to try and judge whether it can be done elsewhere and at other scales and for different types of problems.
A unique element of this project was the availability of funding for local people and others to carry out small-scale research projects addressing an issue relevant to the project’s objectives. Several such studies were carried out as follows (see also ‘downloads’ below):
- Linking Historical Land-Use Change with Palaeolimnological Records of Nutrient Change in Loweswater, Cumbria by Helen Bennion (Department of Geography, University College London) and Angus J L Winchester (Department of History, Lancaster University).
- Community and Culture – Tourism in a Quiet Valley by David Davies and Emer Clarke.
- Hydrogeomorphological investigation of the main streams feeding into and out of Loweswater by Nick Haycock.
- Survey of local washing practices and septic tank operation in relation to domestic phosphorous inputs to Loweswater by Leslie Webb.
A presentation on Linking Land-Use and Water Quality – Modelling Results and Discussion was given at the LCP meeting in August 2010 by Stephen Maberly and Lisa Norton of CEH.
The overall findings of this project are summarised in this booklet. There is also more info about this work on the Lancaster University website and the Catchment Change Management Hub website.
Continue to the Catchment Restoration Fund project.
Downloads
