Northamptonshire primary school planters aim to tackle flooding
"The beauty of these units is that they combine practical flood management with an opportunity to inspire learning about water, nature and climate resilience," he added.Resilience and Innovation Northants (RAIN) Project, which led the scheme, said each stainless steel planter contained 10 wildlife habitats, from bee hotels and hedgehog houses to amphibian refuges and hoverfly homes.Six planters at Oakley Vale Primary School in Corby were fitted with monitoring equipment to allow children and the RAIN team to track rainfall and water capture over time, while the planters were used to grow flowers, tomatoes, herbs and lettuce.Planters are also at five schools around Northampton and Brigstock Latham Primary near Kettering. The RAIN Project is funded by Defra as part of the £200m flood and coastal resilience innovation programme, managed by the Environment Agency.
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BBC News
6 hours ago
- BBC News
Northamptonshire primary school planters aim to tackle flooding
Flower and vegetable planters installed to teach pupils about biodiversity while also helping to tackle flooding have been hailed a 32 specialist planters at seven primary schools in Northamptonshire are designed to help reduce surface water flooding. They include "integrated wildlife habitats" and take water directly from school guttering, reducing pressure on drainage systems, organisers said. "It's been fantastic to work with so many schools who were so enthusiastic to get on board and bring these smart planters into their play areas," support officer Rickileigh Edwards said. "The beauty of these units is that they combine practical flood management with an opportunity to inspire learning about water, nature and climate resilience," he and Innovation Northants (RAIN) Project, which led the scheme, said each stainless steel planter contained 10 wildlife habitats, from bee hotels and hedgehog houses to amphibian refuges and hoverfly planters at Oakley Vale Primary School in Corby were fitted with monitoring equipment to allow children and the RAIN team to track rainfall and water capture over time, while the planters were used to grow flowers, tomatoes, herbs and are also at five schools around Northampton and Brigstock Latham Primary near Kettering. The RAIN Project is funded by Defra as part of the £200m flood and coastal resilience innovation programme, managed by the Environment Agency. Follow Northamptonshire news on BBC Sounds, Facebook, Instagram and X.
The Guardian
20 hours ago
- The Guardian
Thousands of tons of invasive seaweed ‘overwhelming' Spanish beaches
Thousands of tonnes of an aggressive invasive seaweed from south-east Asia are piling up on the beaches of the strait of Gibraltar and Spain's southern coast in what local environmentalists say is a major threat to the region's biodiversity. Since May, the local authority in Cádiz has removed 1,200 tonnes of the alga Rugulopteryx okamurae from La Caleta, the city's most popular beach, including 78 tonnes in a single day. 'We're completely overwhelmed. This is an environmental catastrophe,' said José Carlos Teruel, responsible for Cádiz city council's beaches. 'Whenever the wind is westerly, we know we're in for another wave of seaweed.' As with many other invasive marine species, the alga is thought to arrive in the ballast tanks of ships which pass through the Suez canal and then discharge their tanks in the Mediterranean. In little more than a decade the species has colonised the strait of Gibraltar, much of Spain's southern coast, the Canary Islands, the Azores, and, farther north, the Cantabrian sea and the Basque Country. 'It was first spotted 10 years ago in Ceuta, Spain's north African enclave, by a researcher from Málaga university, but the authorities are always too slow to react,' said Juan José Vergara, a professor of biology at the University of Cádiz. 'In the first phase of an invasion such as this it can be controlled. It's like catching cancer early on before it spreads,' Vergara said, adding that what washes ashore is a fraction of what is underwater. 'But now the scale of it makes it impossible to control. In other seaweed invasions we've seen things revert to normal after a period of 10-15 years but many scientists say they've never seen an invasion on this scale.' The seaweed is having a major impact on the local economy, firstly on tourism in Cádiz and nearby Tarifa, a town popular with windsurfers, and on fishing because it traps fishers' nets and lines and also sucks oxygen out of the water. Then there's the cost to the taxpayer of disposing of it. Perhaps most worrying is its impact on biodiversity. On the beach at La Caleta, the seaweed has driven out many indigenous plants. It is unclear whether the damage is temporary or irreversible. The alga attaches itself to rocks and other surfaces and is also free-floating, wiping out native species of seaweed. It has no predators in the region and its capacity to reproduce both sexually and asexually and to absorb toxins makes it virtually impossible to eradicate, experts say. At present the seaweed is dumped in landfill sites. Vergara said a local business that recycles seaweed into drinks containers or to use as fuel and fertiliser has sought permission to use Rulopteryx okamuraeas as a biomass to produce energy. However, Spain's law on invasive species prohibits their commercial exploitation unless they pose a threat to health and safety or to further their eradication, a caveat that would seem to apply to Rulopteryx okamuraeas. This week the government in Andalucía launched a four-part plan to confront the crisis based on research, monitoring and education, and which includes options for recycling the seaweed. To use it as biomass the regional government will have to negotiate with Spain's environment ministry but Vergara said that even if an agreement is reached, it can only be part of the solution. 'It's an interesting idea but I doubt it will be able to eradicate or even significantly diminish the intensity of the invasion when hundreds of thousands of tonnes can wash up on a single beach,' he said.
BBC News
a day ago
- BBC News
How voices from Daventry travelled the world
This years marks the centenary of the opening of the BBC transmitting station at Daventry in carried the BBC World Service to countries across the world from 1932 to 1992 and was also the site of the world's first national radio how did this small town in the Midlands become a famous name across the globe? Why was Daventry chosen as a transmitter site? When the BBC sprung into life in 1922, radio broadcasts could only be made over short company's chief engineer, Peter Eckersley, believed it was possible to create a long wave transmitter that would serve most of the BBC decided to find a site for a transmitting station that was situated north of a line between the Severn and the Wash, surrounded by as much land as locations were explored and Borough Hill in Daventry turned out to have the best coverage of BBC bought 58 acres (23 hectares) of the hill and started work on constructing the station. There was no road to the top, so it built a rack and pinion railway to haul building materials up the 128m (420ft) masts were erected with a lattice of copper wires and aluminium transmission equipment was housed in a spacious hall with cathedral windows in what became known as the 5XX building. What was the first radio service to be broadcast from Daventry? The station opened on 27 July 1925, with a poem called The Dane Tree written by the-then poet laureate, Alfred first broadcasts, for the BBC's National Programme, mainly originated in London and included plays, like The Glittering Gate, the story of two dead was also music, including popular songs and orchestral items. When was the BBC World Service first broadcast from Daventry? The BBC governors had been considering the idea of broadcasting beyond the shores of the United Kingdom for some corporation's engineers knew that short wave radio signals could travel long distances by reflecting off the ionosphere, part of the Earth's atmosphere, making international broadcasting in 1932, they expanded the site at Daventry and installed two short wave transmitters to send out the Empire Service, as the World Service was then called, to four zones across the a speech to mark the opening on 19 December 1932, the BBC's director-general John Reith warned that the early programmes "will neither be very interesting nor very good", but he also said the launch of the service was "a significant occasion in the history of the British Empire".He predicted that "broadcasting is a development with which the future must reckon and reckon seriously". How big did the international operation at Borough Hill become? As time went on, more services were launched to different countries, and complicated schedules of frequency changes were needed to keep the radio stations on air as atmospheric conditions changed during the engineer John Barry recalls services being broadcast in about 38 languages in the added that most of the languages were for eastern countries, as "in Asia, there are various vernaculars of Chinese, Indian, etcetera whereas, if you broadcast to the west, it was mainly Spanish". What impact did the transmitting station have on Daventry? People living in Daventry reported hearing programmes through metal items in their houses, such as taps and kettles, as well as chimneys and Viveash, another retired engineer, said other aspects of daily life were affected: "When TV started, [the radio signals] did cause a lot of interference with TV, so we went through a bit of a period being unpopular."When cars started to get in-built burglar alarms, you'd get the sound of the programme coming out of the car when you got into it."BBC sports teams were created and a BBC club was opened in Sheaf Street.A number of the men who came to work on Borough Hill ended up marrying local women. Why did the BBC station at Borough Hill close? There were two main reasons why the BBC vacated the Cold War, a period of tension between the USA and the Soviet Union , was over so the USA's international radio service, the Voice of America, moved out of the BBC's site at Woofferton in Service transmission could then be transferred from Daventry to modernising the Daventry facility would have involved constructing a large number of self-supporting towers on Borough Hill in place of masts held up by would have been expensive, and may not have enhanced the Daventry Bird, who worked on the hill for nearly 50 years, was given the honour of switching off the last transmitter on 29 March exhibition is currently open at Daventry's museum telling the story of the BBC's time in the town. Follow Northamptonshire news on BBC Sounds, Facebook, Instagram and X.
