§ Mr. BowisTo ask the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food if he will list the research projects undertaken for his Department by the Natural Environment Research Council during the past five years.
§ Mr. Ryder[holding answer 8 May 1989]: The following research projects have been undertaken for my Department by the Natural Environment Research Council during the five years ending 1988–89. Some of the projects were completed in that period and others are continuing.
Aquatic environment and fisheries
- Factors affecting the population dynamics of sea trout
- The physiology of stress response in freshwater fish
- Effects of flow regimes in salmonid recruitment
- Nutritional requirements and feed behaviour of fish
- The role of nultritional deficiency in disease in farm fish
- Continuous plankton recorder
- Undulating oceanographic recorder deployment off the northeast coast
- Plankton production at seasonal thermocline
- Irish Sea productivity study
- Integration of chemical, physical and biological modelling along the Western European shelf edge
- Organic waste disposal in the marine environment
- Coastal water processes in the Irish Sea and west Scotland
- Organic degradation in the marine environment
- Mercury transformations in the marine environment
- Relationship between lipids in phytoplankton zoo plankton and herring larvae
- Hydrography of the North West approaches
- Bait attraction and longlining
- The ecology of young stages of salmonid fish and the implications for practical river management
- Phytoplankton in relation to mariculture
- Environmental stress and physiology of growth in trout
- Environmental radioactivity: Impact of freshwater ecosystems: Evaluation of Opercular Bone Material
- Fish biology (study of deep sea species)
- Salmonid/coarse fish interaction in chalk streams
- Biology of saprolegnia
Sea Mammal Research
- Whale research (research on population dynamics to support United Kingdom representatives to IWC)
- Seal research (research on population numbers and dynamics, diet and the impact on commercial fisheries)
River and Flood Protection
- Physical aspects of flooding
- Catchment response to rainfall
- Flood statistics
- Wetland hydrology
- Environment impact of flood protection measures
- Distributed catchment models
- Real time forecasting of river flows
- National archive for flood hydrology
- Catchment response modelling for design flood estimation
- Catchment urbanisation
- Effects of agricultural drainage on catchment hydrology
- Catchment response and the flood frequency curve
- Statistical flood estimation procedures
- Hydrological behaviour of flat agricultural catchments
- Environmental impact of flood protection measures on the water regime of wildlife habitats
- River erosion
- Risk based criteria for economic analysis of flood protection works
Marine Flood Protection
- Numerical models of the seas around Britain
- Prediction of sea levels
- Wave action and extreme waves
- Maintenance and monitoring of the East Coast model
- Development of West Coast model
- Development of a combined wave/tide/surge model
- Statistical prediction of extreme levels
502 - Improvement of sea level prediction for flood protection
- Joint probability of waves and sea levels
- Wave set-up
- High wave studies
- Wave-current interaction
- Wave measurement in support of such coast flood protection studies
- Routine wave measurements
- Review of potential of satellite remote sensing for marine flood protection
- Archiving of Class A tide gauge data
- Wave measurement for South Coast studies
- Detailed processes of sand transport by tidal waves etc.
- Movement of material on the sea bed under the combined action of waves and tides