60 - Mersey Valley : Detailed Statements of Environmental Opportunity

This section expands on the Headline Statements of Environmental Opportunity and provides further detail on each of the Statements of Environmental Opportunity.

SEO 1

SEO 1: Conserve and enhance the Mersey Valley’s rivers, tributaries and estuary, improving the ability of the fluvial and estuarine systems to adapt to climate change and mitigate flood risk while also enhancing habitats for wildlife and for people’s enjoyment of the landscape.

For example by:

• Maintaining and enhancing the Mersey Estuary Special Protection Area (SPA) and Ramsar site; bringing habitats into and maintaining favourable condition, such as the intertidal sediments and salt marshes to support the internationally important populations of migratory bird species and assemblage of waterfowl.
• Maintaining and enhancing the biodiversity of the Mersey Estuary, its tributaries and its wider flood plain, including adjacent farmland and wetland that provide habitats supporting wildlife.
• Conserving the open and exposed character of the mudflats/sand flats and salt marshes along the Mersey Estuary, with its expansive estuary views, and enhancing the estuarine habitats that contribute to landscape character and support the wide range of wildlife.
• Improving understanding of the many features and functions of the Mersey Estuary, including its active geomorphological processes and wildlife value, making provision for it to adapt to coastal change.
• Ensuring the retention of mudflats and salt marshes where possible, and allowing space for the continuing dynamic estuarine processes, to retain biodiversity and geomorphological interest and provide a cost-effective defence against erosion/flooding.
• Promoting opportunities to improve the natural functioning of the Mersey Estuary and potentially reduce flood risks through providing space for intertidal habitats to develop and move in response to coastal change, to enhance estuarine habitats and create additional habitats by managed realignment at strategic locations.
• Working with key partners and landowners to identify suitable sites for flood storage, as well as optimising design and implementation of future flood storage areas to create new wetland habitats, such as flood plain grazing marsh, and creating links with existing semi-natural habitats.
• Identifying river stretches for restoration (for example, re-connecting rivers to their flood plains) and taking opportunities to de-culvert and re-naturalise rivers and remove redundant weirs and other obstacles, to provide space for water storage and alleviate speed of run-off, as well as providing connectivity and habitats for wildlife.
• Maintaining and enhancing semi-natural grassland, flood meadows and wet grasslands associated with river flood plains as feeding and breeding sites for wetland birds and for their botanical interest; maintaining and enhancing the coastal and flood plain grazing marshes bordering theRiver Mersey and its tributaries, to attract wetland birds and as refuges for estuarine species at times of severe weather.
• Managing and enhancing habitats such as wetlands and grasslands to capture sediments and contaminants before they enter watercourses; and establishing buffers such as permanent grassland along watercourses.
• Enabling sustainable recreational and educational access for people to sensitively enjoy access to the River Mersey and Estuary where appropriate, for the benefits that contact with the natural environment brings.
• Supporting management to ensure that the River Mersey continues to improve as a clean and ecologically diverse river; seeking to reconnect people, both physically and visually, with the River Mersey, and protecting and enhancing these connections where they do exist.
• Promoting the multiple benefits of a healthy waterside environment.

SEO 2

SEO 2: Promote the Mersey Valley’s historic environment and landscape character and positively integrate the environmental resource with industry and development, providing greenspace within existing and new development, to further the benefits provided by a healthy natural environment, as a framework for habitat restoration and for public amenity.

For example by:

• Capitalising on the strengths of the location, through conserving and enhancing the Mersey River valley, parks and urban green spaces and enabling people to access and enjoy them.
• Carefully designing and integrating green infrastructure within housing, business, transport and industrial development, linking new developments with the wider countryside; looking for opportunities to provide access and outdoor recreation, to retain and enhance landscapes, visual amenity and biodiversity, or to improve damaged and derelict land.
• Developing networks of linear habitats, corridors and stepping stones within housing and industrial development, linking developments with the wider countryside, making a more permeable landscape to enable species movement and to enable urban populations to engage with the natural environment through better access provision.
• Creating new woodlands and planting individual trees in appropriate urban and industrial areas and settlements, such as school playing fields, open spaces, streets, highway verges, institutional grounds, derelict land, on tipped and industrial land and development sites for multi-purpose use as part of the community forest initiative, including innovative wood fuel, timber and forest industries, enhancement of recreation, landscape and biodiversity interests, helping to assimilate new infrastructure, and providing benefits for water quality, soil quality and flood risk management.
• Creating tranquil areas of woodland and other habitats for people to enjoy and increasing opportunities for users to access, and to benefit from, the health and social rewards that their local environment affords them.
• Seeking ways to protect the sense of place and interpret the National Character Area’s (NCA’s) historic and cultural identity to ensure a better understanding of past land use and retain evidence of the relationships between features for the future.
• Conserving open and expansive views of the landscape, such as views from the top of Runcorn Hill.
• Developing sustainable urban drainage systems (SUDS) in new and existing development to improve infiltration and manage surface water.
• Planning to manage over-abstraction from groundwater and rivers through careful and efficient use of water.
• Conserving the NCA’s heritage assets, including archaeological sites, historic buildings and the character of the parkland and villages and ensuring high- quality design.
• Maintaining the wood-pasture management system at Dunham Park, and other parklands, making provision for eventual replacement of trees, while retaining moribund and dead standing timber.
• Promoting sustainable recreation and education opportunities linked to biodiversity, for example at local nature reserves and country parks, and providing interpretation for people to understand and enjoy wildlife and the benefits of the natural environment.
• Providing opportunities for users to access the natural environment sustainably through conserving and enhancing recreational routes, including long-distance footpaths and strategic green links, ensuring that paths are maintained and that some surfaced paths are provided for use by all levels of ability, to enable people to benefit from the health and social rewards that their local environment affords them.
• Deepening appreciation among landowners, industry and the public of the links between geology, landscape and wildlife habitat and their relevance to conserving biodiversity and to sustainable development; providing improved interpretation and educational facilities to increase visitors’ understanding and enjoyment of the NCA’s natural and historic features.
• Maintaining and where possible enhancing all the existing rock exposures and natural landforms, including Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI), which make important contributions to an understanding of the origin and geological development of the Mersey Valley NCA.

SEO 3

SEO 3: Manage the arable and mixed farmland along the broad linear Mersey Valley, and create semi-natural habitats, woodlands and ecological networks, to protect soils and water, enhance biodiversity, increase connectivity and improve the character of the landscape, while enabling sustainable food production.

For example by:

• Conserving the character and wildlife habitats associated with the arable and mixed farming systems, and seeking opportunities to manage and create semi-natural habitats and ecological networks within the farmed environment, which will protect soils and water and enhance biodiversity and the landscape.
• Providing significant year-round habitats that will benefit farmland birds, such as over-wintered stubbles, conservation headlands and buffer strips in arable fields.
• Planning to link and connect fragmented habitats into a more cohesive whole, providing corridors and stepping stones for wildlife, enabling movement of species, and enhancing the landscape.
• Seeking opportunities to restore and enhance hedgerows, field boundary trees and field margins to encourage a network of habitats to link fragmented habitats, to act as a windbreak and bind/filter out the soil in times of flood.
• Protecting historic parklands to enhance the landscape, and creating succession plans to increase the age range of trees in parkland settings.
• Improving water quality, through carefully managing nutrient inputs and providing buffer strips adjacent to watercourses such as in the River Mersey, River Weaver and their tributaries.
• Providing new educational access with interpretation of environmental gains that promote the re-connection between farming, food and the public.
• Exploring and promoting the marketing of quality local produce to nearby extensive urban populations.
• Protecting woodlands, including ancient woodlands, and encouraging the appropriate management of existing woodlands through measures such as diversifying the age structure of tree populations and retaining veteran trees and fallen timber; increasing the extent and continuity of semi-natural woodland in appropriate locations, particularly through enlarging and linking existing woodland sites; and ensuring that any planting complements open habitats for ground-nesting birds.
• Protecting and enhancing the quality of ponds, including those at the internationally designated Rixton Clay Pits Special Area of Conservation (SAC), buffering infield ponds and wetlands and seeking to create new wetland habitats, thus creating strong habitat networks, improving water quality, and establishing stepping stones of wetland habitat.
• Encouraging opportunities to improve, maintain and expand habitats, such as woodlands, grasslands and wetlands, which may increase the sense of tranquillity.

SEO 4

SEO 4: Manage and enhance the mossland landscape in the east, safeguarding wetlands including the internationally important lowland raised bogs, to conserve peat soils, protect and enhance biodiversity, conserve archaeological deposits, contribute to landscape character and store carbon.

For example by:

• Managing and enhancing the Manchester Mosses SAC and other important lowland raised bog habitats.
• Managing areas of lowland raised bog and adjacent land, restoring peat soils to protect wildlife and increase the ability of habitats to actively store and sequester carbon from the atmosphere.
• Restoring and improving the condition of lowland bogs by working with landowners to manage and restore water table levels, and providing hydrological buffer zones of fens, wet pastures or wet woodland to help to manage water.
• Seeking opportunities to re-establish the geomorphological function of mosslands to safeguard the records of palaeo-environmental evidence and to prevent damage to potential buried archaeological remains.
• Seeking opportunities for restoring, enhancing and linking fragmented wetland habitats in former peat-cutting areas and farmlands to realise the potential for restoration schemes and create a complex mossland landscape capable of sustaining the full range of mossland habitats.
• Encouraging the restoration of lowland raised bogs and the mosaic of wetland habitats to conserve wildlife and retain the open character of the NCA’s mossland landscape.
• Improving people’s understanding and enjoyment of the mosslands and the network of lowland raised bogs by providing access and interpretation where possible.
• Seeking opportunities to extend areas of wetland along rivers and in valley bottoms.
• Managing the ditch network to increase their contribution to biodiversity interest.
• Managing existing woodlands, while conserving mossland habitats, to contribute to the character of the wider area.