The Lymington Habitat Creation Lecture

A lecture in Lymington by Colin Scott of ABPMer

Thursday 20th Feb 7:30 pm

Fuller/ MClellan Room, Lymington Community Centre, Cannon Street, SO41 9BQ 

•             20 years ago the practice of coastal habitat creation was a relatively novel concept and undertaken at a small-scale if at all;

•             Today practices such as the landward ‘managed realignment’ of sea defences is a mature and well understood coastal management practice;

•             In the UK alone, over 60 managed realignment projects have been completed through a variety of different approaches; 

•             With each new project, lessons have been learned which have increased our confidence in the effectiveness and value of this approach;

•             As a result we have moved from the small-scale trial initiatives of the early 1990s to much more ambitious landscape-scale projects in recent years (e.g. the Medmerry scheme at Selsey);

•             There are many reasons to undertaking such work such as: improving flood protection, lowering defence maintenance costs; reducing intertidal erosion and achieving a more sustainable coastal morphology;

•             However, implementing these schemes is complex and costly especially at a large scale.  There are many, major challenges associated with them and these were highlighted at the SPS–sponsored conference in November 2013;

•             As a result of these challenges, more novel approaches and more partnership-based working may be needed to help realise such projects in the future;

•             Also, we will need to place more emphasis on protecting the coastal habitats that we have through practices such as saltmarsh recharge.  The two new recharge projects in Lymington provide valuable lessons about how that might be achieved.  

The event is open to all, including non-members. Prior reservation is essential, and to book please click here or 

http://comlay.uk or email us at events@solentprotection.org 

Colin is an Associate consultant with ABP Marine Environmental Research.  He has 20 years’ experience of working on marine Environmental Impact Assessment and ecological monitoring projects.  A large part of his work involves designing, assessing and monitoring managed realignment projects and he also places great emphasis on communicating the lessons being learned from these and other coastal habitat creation projects.   Over the last 10 years, he has been involved with the RSPB’s Wallasea Island Wild Coast realignment project which is set to become the largest and most ambitious coastal wetland restoration project in Europe.  He advised Wightlink on their recharge work at Boiler marsh and is also responsible for the assessment and monitoring work that accompanies that project.