The habitat restoration element of the strategy aims to, among a number of goals, slow the flow of water off the landscape. This will ultimately reduce the power of flood events and over time allow the river’s stability to settle and heal. Key to slowing the flow is riverside woodland restoration, and peatland and wetland restoration, using methods such as leaky dams to hold water back and allow it to enter the river channel more gradually. Many of these actions can bring immediate benefits, as well as longer-term ones.

The programme is initially covering the river and tributaries above Aboyne, which is approximately 900km of stream length and around 1000km2 in area. The restoration strategy is being developed so that the partnership can prioritise sites for work, using information we have about their current status (e.g. salmon populations) and pressures (e.g. water temperature predictions). For example, 300km of streams are already highlighted as at risk of thermal stress.

The width of a riverside buffer strip and the management of its natural or semi-natural vegetation needs to be context-specific and take special account of the hydraulics of the river in the entire catchment. In general though, the bigger the buffer, the bigger the benefits to both the water quality and biodiversity.

Wild Atlantic salmon are vulnerable to impacts when transitioning between the freshwater and marine environment. In the Save the Spring initiative, the component of work focused on this area aims to define exactly what these impacts are (e.g. flows, temperatures, chemicals, predators, disturbance) in Stage 1, and then develop solutions to alleviate any issues identified.

Yes, they do, but we know that the upper parts of the catchment are the main spawning grounds for spring-running salmon so this is where our energy is best focused. What happens in the upper catchment also affects the lower catchment, so habitat restoration in these areas should bring benefits further downstream.

No. Stocking is typically defined as the the artificial augmentation of natural salmon production by the addition of artificially extracted eggs or young fish bred in captivity. This project’s approach to wild fish repopulation does not propose to use fish as broodstock, extract salmon eggs from fish, hatch fish in captivity or stock artificially hatched fish into the wild. Instead the proposed approach is one of conservation translocation – the movement of a wild species from one place to another for conservation benefit. In this case, wild fish will be moved into captivity, reared to maturity, and then released back into the wild, at the same location from which they were captured, to breed naturally.

Genetic diversity has enabled wild Atlantic salmon to be adaptable to change, a feature of the species which is especially important to preserve in the face of the rapid climate and environmental change of today’s world. The Dee’s wild Atlantic salmon populations have adapted to the distinctive characteristics of the catchment over thousands of years and preserving this genetic diversity will give them the best chance of adapting to future environmental change and recovering to sustainable levels.

The project believes in preserving and restoring the Dee’s wild genetic strains of Atlantic salmon and that is why the approach is focused on wild spawning adults and wild hatched offspring. Evidence demonstrates that hatchery-raised stocked salmon survive poorer over the course of their lifecycle when compared to wild hatched fish, and exhibit natural selection towards the domestic environment – i.e. they become adapted to the hatchery and not to the wild. In the long-term, our ambition is to step back and leave behind a self-sustaining wild population, not run a perpetual artificial stocking programme.