Abstract
The roles of native and non-native species in the recolonisation of the River Don in South Yorkshire, England, are considered through the lens of environmental history. Notable as one of the most polluted river systems in Western Europe, the Don-Dearne-Rother catchment runs west to east from South Yorkshire and North Derbyshire and drains a significance part of middle England. However, from their origins in the foothills of the high Pennine hills with peat-bogs and heather moorland, the constituent rivers run through upland-fringe farmland and then into the major urban and industrial centres of the region. By the mid-twentieth century the reaches of these watercourses were grossly polluted and physically degraded too. However, from the 1970s onward there began a slow recovery in environmental quality and this has continued to the present day. This paper focuses on the ecological changes in the main urban zones of the River Don catchment and includes the constituent rivers namely the Sheaf, the Porter, the Rother, the Dearne, the Rivelin, and the Loxley. Importantly, though conservationists may be reluctant to accept it, the new ecology which has emerged throughout the catchment is irreparably changed from that of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. That landscape itself was already majorly altered from the countryside described in the Domesday account of 1086, and that too was much changed from the Romano-British landscape of a millennium earlier. The landscape is changing and is permanently changed and so too is the ecology that it now supports. In this context, a hybrid or recombinant ecology has been observed to develop through the process of eco-fusion and is made up of an intimate mix of native and non-native species.
Highlights
MATERIALS AND METHODSThe study involves historical review of records and published sources for the region (including old photographs of the rivers and detailed botanical surveys) together with a longterm (50 year) observational study and action research with key stakeholders
A LANDSCAPE TRANSFORMEDThis paper considers the ecological fluxes along the River Don catchment in South Yorkshire, United Kingdom
Some level of ecosystem service has been restored to the catchment but not all, and the ecology has largely recovered to include a full range of trophic levels
Summary
The study involves historical review of records and published sources for the region (including old photographs of the rivers and detailed botanical surveys) together with a longterm (50 year) observational study and action research with key stakeholders. The author was involved in the surveys of the 1980s and 1990s, was responsible for policy development and documents for the greening of the River Don valley, and undertook action research and observational research over the period of the study. He directed the establishment of protected areas and nature reserves throughout the catchment, established nature reserves, and cowrote the River Rother Wildlife Strategy (Rotherham et al, 1994). The River Don divided the north from the south, a division reinforced by great wetlands and wooded areas of higher ground (Rotherham, 2017b). “Don, like a weltering worm, lies blue below, And Wincobank, before me, rising green, Calls from the South the silvery Rother slow, And smile on moors beyond, and meads between, Unrivall’d landscape” Elliot, 1840
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