Connecting Limbs: Meet the project which aims to bring life back to Sheffield’s nature-depleted rivers

Along the River Sheaf, scientists and engineers are exploring how to mimic natural processes in heavily urbanised environments.

“Rivers are socially and ecologically complex systems, nested within the landscape. Recognising that complexity is what I’d like to move towards.”

Claire Bithell of the Sheffield & Rotherham Wildlife Trust (SRWT) is telling me about the thinking behind their new Connecting Limbs project, which she is heading up.

Named after the project’s prototype first step in the Limb Brook Valley near Whirlow, the team’s aim is to restore heavily damaged ecosystems along the River Sheaf and its tributaries using nature-based techniques – or at least, methods that mimic the living world.

“It started with the ambition of scaling up natural flood management and nature-based solutions across a watershed catchment,” Claire tells me. “It’s funded by the Water Restoration Fund, which is essentially water company fines which get reinvested back into the environment. Last year was the first time they’ve done that, which is quite a big step.”

The Sheaf, which flows for around 17 miles from its source in the Peak District to where it meets the Don at Castlegate, is a useful testbed for Claire’s team, as it passes through both natural environments as well as more urban settings, where the river has been “denaturalised,” resulting in the collapse of its ecosystems.

”Since a lot of these flood defences were built, there’s never been the funding to maintain them properly”

Claire tells me the one-year ‘demonstrator’ project on the Limb Brook involved “your traditional bread-and-butter natural flood management interventions, like leaky dams, ponds, and a bit of landscape management,” but that the team will have to take a different approach in more built-up areas that the river passes through, such as Meersbrook and Heeley.

“We can do this stuff fairly easily on land where there's not much risk from urbanisation. But around 68% of [the world’s population] are expected to live in urban areas by 2050, so I'm keen to start looking at how we deliver nature-based solutions and natural flood management across the whole spectrum.

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