Mauchline Burn, River Ayr - Green Engineering Project

The project will be delivered by the Ayrshire Rivers Trust who are a highly professional organisation and delivered a very successful habitat project in 2023 with WFF funding. Ayrshire lies close to the increasing fish farming operations around Arran.

The Mauchline burn is quite unique within the River Ayr catchment as it has retained natural river features such as winding meanders, a rarity elsewhere across Ayrshire in agricultural settings. While the burn offers a wealth of pool-riffle-run habitats these are not utilised by salmonids due to eutrophication and sedimentation brought about by livestock access. The project is designed to address this issue at a fairly large and ambitious scale.

A key component of the project involves installing 625m of livestock fencing to establish protected riparian buffers. Within these buffers, the Trust will use a combination of locally sourced materials and green engineering techniques such as brash bundles, willow mattress, coir membrane, re-seeding and bank re-profiling to restore eroded and continually collapsing riverbanks back into a functioning river features that can provide habitats and resources to a range of species. Riparian tree planting will provide a long-term seed stock to support future natural regeneration as well as act to intercept rainfall, slow rainwater run-off, stabilise the riverbanks, provide new habitats and a source of shade, nutrient and food input for fish species. There are sections of the Mauchline burn that have been straightened and fenced, as part of this project they will also plant trees along these sections.