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Our science is published in a variety of formats. Click here for more information. We also attend events and conferences in the UK, within Europe, and at venues around the world.Scientists meet this week to discuss changes in the Lake Windermere fish population after sixty years of monitoring work – 2nd June 2008
Leading scientists from the U.K., Norway, France and North America are meeting this week to discuss recent findings on the fish populations of Windermere and to plot a route for further international collaboration. The meeting, which will be held on 2 and 3 June at the Royal Society in London, is being organised by Dr Ian J Winfield of the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology in Lancaster and Professor Nils Christian Stenseth of the Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis at the University of Oslo.
Dr Winfield said “Studies of the fish populations of Windermere, which is England’s largest lake, were started in the 1940s by the Freshwater Biological Association as part of an initiative to develop fisheries on the lake during the hard times post World War II. This later developed into a purely scientific monitoring programme which in recent times has been run by the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology. These decades of effort have produced datasets of world-class quality and quantity on the lake’s perch, pike and Arctic charr populations and their changing environment”.
Professor Nils Christian Stenseth commented “International collaboration between our two groups has enabled us to ask some very specific and very fundamental questions which have great relevance to our wise management of harvestable fish resources worldwide. For example, we have been able to show how pike actively move between the two basins of Windermere depending on local conditions, and how the recovery of the population from the wartime fishery has interacted with natural evolutionary pressures. The high quality of our studies, which has resulted in publications in several leading scientific journals, has only been possible because of the quality of the work done at Windermere by generations of scientists”.
The timing of this forward-looking meeting is highly appropriate given the increasingly apparent effects of climate change and recent declines in the lake’s famous Arctic charr, changes in its pike and an explosion of introduced roach.
Dr Winfield said “Although we have been concerned with fundamental questions of interest at the global scale, we are also keen to address current environmental problems at Windermere and so in some way repay the hospitality shown to our work by the local community over many years. We are particularly pleased to be able to pursue such efforts through a number of collaborative actions with fisheries and environmental protection officers of the Environment Agency”.
Additional informationCEH long-term lake monitoring: the Cumbrian Lakes Database
