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at first you might think that cutting down a perfectly healthy tree into a river is a pretty destructive thing to be doing but fear not cuz we're Mossy Earth and Nature's restoration is our goal and rather surprisingly dropping entire trees along with branches twigs and any other kind of Woody debris into rivers is actually essential to the functioning of the entire ecosystem and in the past this crucial element of our Rivers has actually been removed Studies have actually found that people associate wood in rivers as being something which is messy or untidy or a hazard or potentially associated with flooding but in reality we actually really need to have wood in our Rivers it acts as a catalyst which can
transform the surrounding habitat and provide new opportunities for all manner of creatures which we'll get into and we'll be showing exactly what we've been doing but first I just want to give you a recap on this project so far last year Ellie and I introduced you to a partnership that we forged with Bart the Bristol aen Rivers trust Bart worked to restore rivers in the southwest of the UK here the rivers and their green corridors are essential for wildlife but they're not always in optimal condition our project areas are based on the river Chu and its tribute trees and there we got to see some areas which were in need of some attention but there were also some areas which showed a lot of
potential too there are some places with the potential to create entire Wetlands there is the need to re wiggle wers create buffer strips replant bear areas thin out over grown sections and of course introduce complex Woody debris which is the fancy term for putting wood back into rivers so for this one we're actually up in the headwaters of the river cheu this is where the river starts so it's very important that we improve the conditions here cuz it impacts the rest of the river I arrived on site a couple days after the guys from Bart had begun the work it was also nice to see a couple of Mossy Earth members volunteering and helping out so we're joined today by Flora who's actually a Mossy Earth member hey she's
come down to do a bit of volunteering right yeah that's the one I've been um hammering in Stakes into the ground and seeing kind of learning a little bit more about the river and what we're doing and why she quite local to the area right so I live about 20 minutes away from here in Bristol and I run through kind of around these areas all the time and my background's in biology so it's really cool to kind of learn a little bit more about the Ecology of the area and what people are doing to conserve it yeah I came into contact with Bart through sort of trying to get volunteering opportunities and work in the sort of river restoration and environmental sector and then I think I
was already a subscriber to Moss Earth anyway and um yeah I saw this project come up when the video got put out and I was like I need to be on this project um it's just such a good opportunity I suppose it was great to meet Flor and Alex their initiative to get involved with the project was great to see we've actually been busy working on other ways more people can get involved in rewilding and have built a course to help you do just that which will be available very soon after getting waiters on and a wonderful health and safety briefing from Nick it was time to get started and finish off a job from the previous day so over last night we had some pretty heavy rain that's why the river looks like chocolate it is
normally really clear there's some really nice gravels here it's actually a really nice patch of the uh of The Chew but um we had some of these logs lodged in and they've come free in the rain so what we're trying to do now is just get them back in we can bring that around up over uh where Rob's standing um sprad it that way and then we'll twist it around to kind of match what is going on here you guys ready y you see the force of the water had actually moved these lcks so to ensure that they stay in place we went through a process of securing them properly which started by banging in staks either side wire was then doubled over in a loop around the stakes and then Twisted together tightly bringing the stakes
together and around the lock metal pins were added to secure the wire in place the stakes were then banged down into the Earth to really pull it all together tightly over the log and then the tops were swn off yeah nice smell coming off of that smells good yeah it smells like really well Woody obviously so far we've done three different methods of putting Woody debris into the system and here we have what is arguably one of the most effective which is known as a hinged tree this is a hinged method and you basically chop the tree down but you don't cut it clean you allow it to still stay attached and therefore it's still alive so you know it's not going to go anywhere in periods of high flow and it can also grow out again and
that's very important so there's actually two of three here there's one here they're all overlapping and crossing and uh you can already see that they're already starting to collect all of this Woody debris and here what what we've got is known as a burm which is essentially just a load of brash and branches which have been pinned down into place the stakes here have actually gone into the side of the bank um but they can sometimes go down into the bed as well so we have the larger which get Stak down the hin trees and the burms these are the three main methods we'll be using to introduce wood back into the river and of course we'll be also getting the chainsaw and felling
much bigger trees straight in but just before we do that we should probably explain exactly how wood helps a river ecosystem once this work has been finished and it's bedded in it will only take a few months and you'll start to see new pools uh open up new riffles new um areas of gravel um and that would just increase the amount of habitat available and because there's more habitat there's more niches for different um inverte fish to fill um and that in turn then allows it to support more biodiversity which in turn will then support more uh King fishes herin and everything else that relies on the river and you also end up with areas like here where we've opened up the tree canopy a little bit allows more light so
we are actually in Blue Bell Woodland here so not see at the moment but this area like this blue bells really like it where you get that new light com in so that will benefit them as well and in the river um because it's quite shaded around here which is really good at holding and lowering the water temperature but with small Pockets it will allow um different um plants to grow in the river which in turn will add a new habitat that doesn't currently exist here at the moment so they're real a real Catalyst if you will yeah so it will essentially enable the environment and the river to do what it wants so you might actually be wondering how we're able to fund this kind of work
set up these projects well here at Moss Earth we run a membership subscription which anybody can be a part of on a monthly basis you know people from all over the World contribute money we take that money and we set up and we run these rewarding projects it's actually a really exciting way to contribute to what can feel like a really big problem sometimes we find Partners to collaborate with like we have done here with Bart but you know sometimes we set up projects ourself like we have done with oysters in Scotland or in the Amazon jungle where we just brought a patch of rainforest really exciting stuff we're now seeing our impact all over the world all of our work is
visible through reports in your account through these update videos here on YouTube and also within our lovely monthly Field Report and if you want to dig a Little Deeper we post a quarterly financial report as well as all of our major transactions on our website so if this sounds like something you're interested in and you want to become a Mossy Earth member I'll leave a link to our website down in the comments the following day after a night of heavy rain we were joined by Ed who was our tree surgeon and he had the responsibility of felling the trees into the river so due to the water being so high there's literally no way we can safely go in and um continue building the structures which we were building
which is a shame but we are going to be felling and dropping a pretty big tree into the river um so that's going to be awesome I can't wait to do that and also here today we've got another Mossy Earth member team member I should say which is John you're typically like more I would say behind the computer right yeah pretty much John does like all of the awesome Graphics like all the mountains I wonder if we've used them in this video maybe I don't know yet maybe but uh yeah John will be helping film today because when we bring down this tree it's going to be a little bit of uh Logistics I would say felt so much pressure to fell Tre so much pressure to fell tree there's no pressure my sir the
plan was to fill one bigotry first and then some smaller ones later there'll be no need to secure these in as their weight should hold them in place with all of our cameras rolling and everyone in position it was time to bring down the tree the cool thing about all of this work is that this is what would naturally happen over time entire trees will fall branches and twigs will snap off and Lodge themselves in the river the difference is that we're accelerating this process in this space of just a few days we're able to do what could potentially take decades so we're just going to do one more tree it's actually this one here which is kind of in the process of coming down we're just going to help it along its way it's
going to come down but that'll be us for the day we can't exactly get into the river to do any more of the BMS or like pinning down anything in it's just too high um but yeah if you think this project is worth supporting then you can become a member I'll put a link to this down in the comments feel free to go and check out some of other videos on some of our other projects which are now all over the world but in the meantime thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next
