Japanese knotweed trial

by | Jun 13, 2015 | General

Last July I blogged a post about a trial that I thought was worth undertaking on the hard to kill Japanese knotweed. The original post can be found here by following this link  www.ayrshireriverstrust.org/blog/2014/07/31/japanese-knotweed-trial/ It was a very simple...

Giant hogweed control – update

by | Jun 11, 2015 | General, Invasives

Following up on the previous years control of non native invasive species, ART managed to secure a limited amount of funding to allow us to control Giant hogweed in Ayrshire. Control on the River Ayr catchment should be complete by the end of the week with only a few...

Farmed Salmon Escape

by | Jun 11, 2015 | Conservation, fishing, General

Last week, 16000 farmed salmon, each of around 10lbs in weight (4.5kg) escaped from a sea cage into the Kilbrannan Sound between Arran and the Mull of Kintyre. These fish may end up in Ayrshire’s rivers and the last thing we need is them breeding with our wild...

Catrine Dam today

by | Jun 3, 2015 | Conservation

We headed to Catrine Dam this morning to have a look at the levels following our visit last night. At 6.00pm yesterday, the entrance to the fish pass was obliterated by the flow over the dam back thundering into the entrance to the fish pass. Water levels last night...

Diffuse pollution

by | Jun 3, 2015 | Conservation, General

Again on the Ayr, we visited the Dippol Burn near Ochiltree to see what condition the habitat was in. Previously this burn’s fish population has been surveyed by ART and never a trout was found over several years although pollution tolerant species such as Stone...

An interesting day out on the Ayr

by | May 28, 2015 | General

Following heavy rain overnight, the River Ayr was in spate as we headed out to collect more temperature data from the loggers in the upper catchment. We headed straight to Glenbuck and downloaded data from the very top of the catchment. When we were there I took Muir...

Temperature data loggers

by | May 27, 2015 | Conservation, General

Nearly one year on from when we installed temperature data loggers across the river Ayr catchment to assess long term changes in water temperatures driven by Global Warming, we returned today to download the data. Unfortunately the rain was pelting down and this...