Crayfish and your development
Baseline surveys
Works affecting water courses such as river and canal restoration, water extraction / discharge, bridge installation & repair, repairs or removal of weirs, or developments near to a water course in areas with known or historic distribution records of white-clawed crayfish will usually require surveys.
Our baseline surveys can be conducted from mid-July to mid-September and comprise a desk study, habitat assessment and a manual search following the standard method (Peay S (2003). Monitoring the White-clawed Crayfish Austropotamobius
pallipes. Conserving Natura 2000 Rivers Monitoring Series No. 1, English Nature, Peterborough). Where conditions allow additional search techniques including sweep netting and kick netting may also be used.
Torching, trapping & eDNA
Where the standardised method of manual search is considered ineffective due to water depth / flow, turbidity, soft substrate or lack of refuges suitable for hand search we may advise on additional surveys.
Where suitable conditions including flow, clarity and bankside access allow night-time torching surveys may be considered as an option for determining presence or confirming the use of natural bankside refuges.
Conducted under a site specific licence from the Environment Agency we can provide trapping surveys utilising a mixture of EA approved funnel traps and artificial refuge traps.
Population density surveys
Where population density information is required to inform the impact assessment we can deploy an intensive fixed-area sampling manual search technique to record population dynamics.
Avoidance, mitigation & compensation.
Once all survey work has been completed we will assess the likely impacts of your works and advise accordingly on how the impacts can be minimised, what suitable mitigation and compensation techniques can be used to achieve your proposed works in a crayfish friendly manor.
Throughout the whole process you will get the personal service of dealing directly with local ecologist and licenced white-clawed crayfish worker Andrew Tillson-Willis to ensure that your project runs as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible.
Contact us today to discuss your white-clawed crayfish survey requirements
We can help with all of your crayfish survey requirements get in touch for your free quotation
- Habitat scoping surveys.
- Desk studies.
- Baseline surveys.
- Presence / likely absence surveys including environmental DNA (eDNA).
- Trapping surveys.
- Population density surveys.
- Avoidance, mitigation & compensation strategies.
- Habitat improvement and restoration.
- Exclusion.
- Pollution prevention plans.
- Biosecurity risk assessments.
- Ecological Clerk of Works (ECoW).
- Population monitoring.
- Invasive species control.
