Monitoring of the Irva Lakes Started

At the beginning of September the Foundation’s environmentalists held a workshop for the fishers of the Irva branch of the AgroUdora cooperative to reinforce fish resources monitoring skills of the cooperative’s members.

As Nikolay Shilov, the Model River Mezen project coordinator, believes, monitoring is essential to get the understanding of the current status of fish resources at fishery plots. So, later the situation may be controlled by a number of tools, like release of juvenile fish, reclamation, reduction of fishing pressure either at fishery plots, or for specific fish species, or within a specific period.

The visit showed that some cooperative members fail to understand the need in the monitoring surveys, however, those who conduct monitoring activities keep their registers in a proper way. It proves that the workshops held, including the ones arranged this year (AgroUdora Cooperative Foremen Meeting), turned out to be effective. The cooperative members have mastered the technique and are able to use it now.

The participants of the trip also noticed an extremely low level of water in the Irva river, which is typical for all Udora rivers this year. The hot summer triggered heavy growth of aquatic plants. All that influenced the condition of water resources. As an example, fish kill areas were detected at Krivushev-ty lake, so big fish escaped from the area, while small fish died. The reason is large quantity of oxygen produced by plants throughout the day and consumed by them at night, which creates oxygen deficit for the fish. Moreover, water acidity fluctuation in the day time caused by increased carbon dioxide concentration is an additional adverse factor for fish resources.

Silver Taiga’s specialists jointly with AgroUdora representatives are trying to include the fishery plot to the Action Plan of Water Body Fish Reclamation, as reclamation measures are obviously necessary for the Irva lakes to conduct efficient economic activities.

You can find the detailed photo and video report of the trip in our group vk.com/silvertaiga.