The Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust is looking forward to welcoming visitors to its stand at the 2009 CLA Game Fair at Belvoir Castle in Leicestershire. One of the key themes of the stand is the Trust’s expanded freshwater fisheries research, based on the River Frome in Dorset.

It is widely accepted that a global decline has occurred in Atlantic salmon since the 1970s and the Trust’s fascinating catchment-based ‘natural laboratory’ on the River Frome will enable researchers to answer many of the really important questions relating to salmon and sea trout populations.

Dr Anton Ibbotson, who heads the salmon research team said, “We have developed specialist techniques for tagging individual fish and this works in conjunction with our state-of-the-art fish counting, monitoring and tag detection equipment installed on the river. So far we have tagged 40,000 salmon parr and they will provide vital data as they return to the river from the sea in the next 3 – 4 years.â€