During the 2017 survey season a total of 120 sites were surveyed and an additional 16 sites had fish rescues conducted, using the full quantitative method, within the Derwent catchment. The number of survey sites decreased slightly compared to the previous year, due to wet weather and persistent high flows throughout the survey season.
In total 2034 trout were recorded and 678 salmon, which can be further broken down into 1890 trout fry and 606 salmon fry. 115 sites or 85% of those surveyed had Trout fry present, whilst 52 sites or 38% of those surveyed had Salmon present, 83 sites (61%) had minor fish species such as eels, lamprey, sticklebacks, minnows and stoneloach.
Post Storm Desmond, trout numbers in particular seem to be recovering well. Less salmon than trout were found and more sites had no or few salmon, but in several places such as Sandy Beck, St John’s Beck and Whit Beck, salmon numbers were good. This is the third year of surveying juvenile salmonids in the River Derwent catchment so whilst the results cannot yet be used to detect trends, a database is being built using the results and minor comparisons between the years have been made. It is obvious that Storm Desmond affected fry numbers in 2016.
A huge thank you to everyone involved including funders, landowners who gave access permissions and especially all the wonderful volunteers who came along to give us a hand surveying. Without you all this project would not be possible.
| Name | Type | Size |
|---|---|---|
| Electrofishing Report 2017 | 14.44 MB | |
| 2017 raw data | xlsx | 94.32 KB |
