Preparing for winter with natural flood management

By Sam Buckland

Sussex Flow Initiative Natural Flood Management Officer

As the memory of the incredibly hot and dry summer begins to fade, Sussex Flow Initiative started preparations for a busy winter of delivery of a number practical works to slow and store water within the Ouse Catchment. Making a more resilient landscape for wildlife and people in periods of drought, like we have been experienced, as well as heavy rainfall.

One really exciting mini project we have started is ‘Catch it if You Can!’, which is an Adur and Ouse Catchment Partnership project, supported by the CaBA Water Resources Communication and Engagement Fund. Working with Ouse and Adur Rivers Trust will work with the entire school community of Northlands Wood Primary Academy in Haywards Heath. It seeks to increase their understanding of sustainable water use, through the creation of a demonstration / ambassador raingarden, with an emphasis on actions that can be replicated at home to slow and store water. Once completed, there will be an interactive water wall, where pupils can pump water to the top of a catchment and direct it/watch it move through the landscape to the sea, as well as the creation of habitats, such mini green roofs, a series of rain planters to capture runoff from school buildings, as well as a mini wetland area. So far we have completed the restoration of a wildlife pond that forms part of core of the mini wetland area, with are a new stream channel that pupils can build leaky dams in as it conveys rainfall that cascades from a number of tiered miniature storage ponds, down the slope to new sunken bog planters.

We have also continued our work in the wider catchment, including working on one site to remove historic redundant land drains that expedited the move of water off this particular farm. Instead we are bring this water to the surface, and slowing it down through a series of small ponds that fill up with water to create incredible network of freshwater habitats, once these ponds fill up, the water flows down the slope through brash bundles we have installed to slow the water down and aid vegetation to growth. It has been fantastic to return to where we have undertaken similar works in previous years in the summer to see frog spawn within the ponds, the grass lush a green from retaining water into the dry summers and the air full of the sight and sounds of dragonflies.

More about the Sussex Flow Initiative here