River Lea Catchment Partnership - Canons Brook restoration

1. Canons Brook restoration

To achieve water quality that is good enough to support a healthy aquatic ecology
To maintain and enhance the river's natural habitats and wildlife

To tackle various problems facing the Cannons Brook, to generally improve the health of the watercourse

There are various problems facing the Cannons Brook. These include:

Silting – where sediment washing into the brook and chokes the bed.
Poor habitat quality – resulting in an absence of plant and animal species.
Plastic rubbish – much of this plastic debris is washed downstream and accumulates in the brook.
Poor water quality – due to run off from areas upstream.

Various measures are proposed to tackle these problems in a coordinated way. These include:

Cutting back of some overshading trees and shrubs to increase the amount of light reaching the river. This will enable more plants to grown in the channel and on the banks.
Exclude grazing animals from the river bank by fencing off the channel – this will allow bankside vegetation to develop, and will also reduce water pollution and the erosion of the bank by grazing animals.
Planting of emergent vegetation in the channel itself.
Clean up the plastic debris and attempt to identify the source, then develop some possible solutions.