Galloway Fisheries Trust Meeting

It was great to catch up with the work of the Galloway Fisheries Trust at their recent open meeting held in Gatehouse of Fleet. Heather Trust Project Manager Patrick Laurie attended an afternoon of discussion and presentations looking at some of the Trust's work over the last twelve months.

Much of the afternoon was focussed on monitoring local populations of salmon, sparling and (unfortunately) american signal crayfish, but there are some big areas of crossover between the Galloway Fisheries Trust and the Heather Trust.

An increasing emphasis on water quality, flood prevention and riparian habitats all link back to healthy uplands, and it's useful for the Heather Trust to keep in touch with the work being carried out in these areas by fisheries at a catchment scale. During the afternoon, one of the GFT presentations specifically described peatland restoration projects in areas of commercial forestry, and another looked at mitigating the impact that industrial development for forestry and renewable energy can have on water quality and biodiversity. This is music to our ears at the Heather Trust, integrating a full range of interests and balancing them so that we can get the best out of our uplands.

Galloway Fisheries Trust are a small charity punching well above their weight, and it's easy to keep in touch with them given that they are also based in southwest Scotland. At the same time, GFT concerns overlap with wider issues across the UK, and it would be good to develop ties with similar local organisations up and down the country.