Common standards monitoring • Managed realignment

Managed realignment

Saltmarsh squeeze (loss of habitat resulting from enclosure and erosion caused by sea level rise and/or other factors) has occurred in many coastal and estuarine areas, especially in south east England. Reversing this process through the Managed Realignment of flood defences is an increasingly common option for recreating saltmarsh and forms one of the generic options of any flood management strategy. Monitoring the effectiveness of such realignment is important in helping to determine the success of such schemes and can contribute to wider knowledge to help shape the policy on how far, and over what scale (temporal and spatial), this approach to management should be applied.

A summary of a detailed monitoring approach applied at a single site, by way of an example, is provided below:

In some situations a detailed NVC survey monitoring approach may not be required. Important trends can still be deduced from a more targeted, specific approach. For example, monitoring carried out on Trimley Marshes Managed Realignment site (Posford Haskoning, 2004) employs the following approach:

It should be noted that whatever monitoring regime is adopted for a scheme, it should be proportional to the size of the scheme and/or the impacts of it. This can be determined at a number of stages in the process but would certainly form part of an Environmental Impact Assessment for planning approval or could form part of a Strategic Environmental Assessment of a plan (for example a flood management strategy or Shoreline Management Plan). Each site (and project) is likely to have a different range of sensitivities that will determine the parameters to be monitored and the level of detail required.