Understanding Catchment-Based Initiatives That Support Habitat Recovery and Improved Water Quality in Tamar Estuary, England

Monday, July 20, 2026, 11:00 AM

Session: SOC Poster Session (In-person)

Conservation strategies and efforts to restore estuarine habitats that provide ecosystem services, such as seagrass, saltmarsh, and oyster reefs, are having limited or variable success in the UK. Upstream water quality driven by human perturbation has been linked to these successes and failures with excess nutrients (nitrogen and phosphorus) causing damaging eutrophication. Empirical modelling involving the use of weighted regression on time, discharge and season (WRTDS) was deployed for long-term river water quality analysis across the Tamar catchment. The result of the empirical analysis indicates that’s there have been periods of short term improvement in nitrogen and phosphorus fluxes in the past which coincide with the emergence of intertidal seagrass in the estuary. However, this outcome is quite inconsistent with prevailing narratives of environmental decline driven by combine sewage overflows (CSO) discharges. The next phase of my research is to develop a dynamic explanation of these observed changes. Specifically, I seek to identify the interventions introduced during the study period and to assess whether their cumulative and interacting effects contributed to downstream water quality improvement and coastal habitat recovery. These questions are inherently concerned with feedback structure, time delays, non linearity, and threshold behaviour, making system dynamics an appropriate and necessary framework.