source for catchments and the great barrier reef · mixed land use leads at time to water...
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eWater is working to support the Reef Plan in partnership with organisations in Queensland.
Focusing on four of the catchments that run into the Great Barrier Reef lagoon, the project teams are applying eWater’s catchment-modelling software to integrate the monitoring and modelling of sediment and nutrient entering the lagoon.
Declining water quality in the catchments near the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) has been identified as a national priority that threatens the long term health of the reef. In response, the Federal and Queensland governments have developed a Reef Water Quality Protection Plan (2003) to improve the quality of water entering the reef by 2013.
For the waterways of the GBR catchments the key values and priorities for the future are to:
• halt and reverse the decline in water quality entering the reef within ten years (Reef Plan); and
• rehabilitate and conserve areas so they can have a role in removing water-borne pollutants.
The challenges are being tackled by identifying hotspots in the catchments that are sources for sediment (TSS), nitrogen (TN), and phosphorus (TP), and developing management scenarios in consultation with local landholders and catchment groups.
Runoff is the single largest threat to water quality, introducing contaminants such as sediment, nutrients and agri-chemicals into the Great Barrier Reef lagoon.
eWater’s Source for catchments has been chosen for its accuracy in simulating the issues and for its help in developing effective solutions.
eWater’s catchment-modelling framework has been specifically set up using data for each catchment. In the Burdekin area, for instance, it is calibrated as a hydrology model, simulating wet and dry weather concentrations of sediment, TN and TP in relation to erosion hazard indices.
On the ground, implementation of the Reef Plan is being helped by a growing understanding of processes, and ongoing consultation with local communities and landholders. Source for catchments can potentially provide additional support, particularly with future model development extending its capacity to simulate movement of dissolved nutrients and gully erosion.
SOURCE FOR CATCHMENTS AND THE GREAT BARRIER REEF
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WHITEHORSE FISH LADDER AND DAM YUKON CANADA.
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Do dams on rivers cause changes in fish assemblages? Does acid mine drainage cause degradation of stream macroinvertebrate assemblages? Do invading species cause the loss of local biodiversity? In an ideal world the answers to such questions would be self-evident and entirely indisputable. In the real world today, it can sometimes depend who you ask...
Ecological restoration and ecological assessment is complicated by the extreme difficulty of drawing firm cause-and-effect conclusions from environmental investigations.
What the world urgently needs, a growing body of scientists believe, is both an open, accessible international database for storing and sharing ecological evidence from the literature, and methods and software capable of analysing that evidence. Now an international group of scientists and water managers is actively working to devise both of these.
A partnership of scientists and managers from North America, Europe and Australia is working to establish such a Global Evidence Exchange, and to address issues such as the need to develop suitable content governance, set standards for interoperability between databases and create web technology for sharing evidence. The team also agree on the need to develop a not-for-profit, yet sustainable, business model to ensure that the benefits of a Global Evidence Exchange endure.
The Global Evidence Exchange will not by itself improve the use of evidence in environmental decision making. Equally essential are methods and tools that draw on evidence to support decision making.
Pioneering the field, Richard Norris and eWater colleagues from the universities of Canberra and Melbourne urged the adoption of ‘causal criteria’. Causal criteria were first adopted in a landmark 1964 report prepared by an advisory committee to the US Surgeon General on the health effects of smoking (USDHEW 1964). In that report, the committee recognised that experimental design issues, such as those described above, mean that statistical methods alone are often insufficient for proving causal relationships, which instead were a matter of judgement. The causal criteria are a series of logical devices designed to aid such judgement.
eWater researchers have developed new software — called Eco Evidence —to help users apply causal criteria in environmental investigations. It allows the analysis of existing evidence in a well-documented, transparent, repeatable and rigorous manner. Eco Evidence can also be used to store evidence from a particular analysis, or ‘published’ to its online database by forward-thinking research and management organisations, so it can be re-used or shared with other users.
FACILITATING EVIDENCE-BASED ENVIRONMENTAL DECISION MAKING
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In Northern Victoria’s Goulburn and Ovens rivers, a team of researchers are trialling a landmark water quality and quantity software model while exploring the response of key ecological indicators to flow scenarios, including floodplain wetting events. The research integrates ecological and hydrological modelling science as it reviews current understanding of the role of overbank flows in maintaining riparian ecosystems. The team is also investigating options for ‘piggy-backing’ of flow releases onto naturally occurring flow events.
The findings will help water management authorities better understand the influence of tributary inflows on flood heights.
“We will soon be in a position to determine the likely ecological effects of restoring such flows in the Goulburn river system,” says Northern Victoria Focus Catchment Coordinator Wayne Tennant, of the Goulburn Broken Catchment Management Authority.
The project was instigated in part to help ‘road-test’ Source for catchments, the first component of eWater’s landmark integrated water modelling suite, eWater Source, to be publicly released. A range of other water models is also being put to the test that combine rainfall runoff, flow routing and hydraulic models, to explore the possible impact of various climatic conditions (based on historical and predicted events) in relation to rewetting off-channel habitats.
Ultimately the team expects to ensure better environmental outcomes without compromising consumptive needs and to improve operational management of environmental water reserves, whatever the prevailing climate.
Four current eWater models have been tested in the Northern Application Project:
• Eco Modeller;
• Eco Evidence Analysis to develop/evaluate ecological response models;
• Source for catchments models on key Ovens and Goulburn River tributaries;
• River Manager Modelling, trial use on Goulburn River.
AFTER THE FLOOD
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The Mount Lofty Ranges (MLR) catchments cover around 1600 km2 and are a vital part of Adelaide’s water supply. The region features both unspoilt bushland and a diverse mosaic of land uses, including agriculture, horticulture and urban usage. A highly productive agricultural area with fertile soils and reliable annual rainfall, the MLR is under pressure from burgeoning human activity and is facing a changing climate, landscape, and hydrological regime. It has five major rivers: Gawler, Torrens, Little Para, Sturt and Onkaparinga.
The catchments play a central role in Adelaide’s water supply, providing storage for River Murray water and runoff following rains.
As the most biologically diverse region in South Australia, MLR contains many species unique to the region as well as half of the State’s species of native plants and three quarters of its native birds. The Australian Government declared the area one of 15 Biodiversity Hotspots in Australia in 2003. Mixed land use leads at time to water contamination and complicates environmental flow management, demanding a multi-layer management approach.
The state’s natural resource managers are juggling the environmental and human demands for water resources. The long term health of the catchments is important not only for inhabitants and ongoing land use activities, but also for addressing the city’s increasing water needs. An associated project is also assessing likely ecological responses to flow patterns in regulated river reaches. The outputs will guide management actions and water-release decisions.
The project teams have been using eWater’s Source for catchments software to model the relationship between land use, climate, water quality and flow, and the impacts these have on supporting viable fish populations. Team members come from SA Environment Protection Authority, the South Australian Research & Development Institute (SARDI), the Department for Water, SA Water Corporation and CSIRO.
The work uses the Event Mean Concentration/Dry Weather Concentration (EMC/DWC) method to characterise pollutant concentrations in receiving waters from a runoff event. This involves taking water samples in proportion to the flow rate (proportional sampling) then compositing these into a single sample for analysis.
ANALYSING WATER QUALITY IN THE MOUNT LOFTY RANGES
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When rivers are dammed, physical and ecological impacts on waterways and their floodplains are unavoidable. The effect can be clearly seen in the Republic of Korea, where multipurpose dams built for flood protection, water supply and hydro-energy generation obstruct almost every major river. The damage is most evident downstream, where dams have shifted river gradients and dramatically altered flow regimes. In some cases impacts on available floodplain habitats have been profound, hitting both river biology and local communities.
Keen to mitigate such outcomes, the Korean Government has initiated numerous river restoration projects since the 1990s designed to improve physical characteristics of river channels and improve water quality.
Yet the effect of such good work has been hampered by a lack of knowledge about the ecological consequences of flow regime changes. Missing have been methodologies to quantitatively determine the effects of dam operations on downstream habitat and ecological conditions. Those methodologies must be flexible enough to accommodate the varied conditions found throughout Korea’s river basins.
To address the deficit, a team from eWater CRC has been working with the Korea Water Resources Corporation (K-water) in a partnership arrangement. K-Water is charged with developing a national integrated water management strategy, initially focused on environmental flows in the Geum River Basin (GRB). The team comprised researchers from many disciplines, including hydrology, geomorphology, aquatic chemistry, water quality, algal ecology, fish ecology and vegetation ecology.
The aim was to achieve a much firmer understanding of the likely consequences of establishing an environmental flow regime suitable for fish.
The research was partly supported by a grant from the Sustainable Water Resources Research Center and involved application of eWater CRC’s river catchment expertise and Toolkit to GRB.
The researchers are confident the resultant GRB conceptual model, used in conjunction with the eWater integrated toolkit, will allow river managers to isolate the physical and biological effects associated with dam operations. They also hope it will assist development of sustainable river management strategies. The GRB conceptual model is providing a framework for structuring, analysing, and quantifying the impacts of altered hydrologic regimes below dams on the river’s ecosystem and on an endangered fish species. The conceptual model can also be helpful in identifying reference scenarios for comparative purposes, and in facilitating evaluation of future restoration strategies.
ASSESSING FISH HABITAT AND FLOW REQUIREMENTS IN KOREAN RIVERS
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FISHING ON GEUM RIVER
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The timing, quantity and duration of environmental flows can mean the difference between a healthy wetland ecosystem pulsing with life and one in decline.
Ensuring every release achieves maximum effect requires thorough understanding of a wetland’s characteristics and the way its geomorphology, water and ecology interact.
Without such knowledge, effectively applied, the health of our wetlands is threatened, and precious water intended to improve the environment is wasted.
That’s why a well-conceived and executed ecosystem response model for river flows can be such a powerful weapon in the armoury of natural resource managers, letting them test a range of scenarios as they juggle competing needs for water.
Now the NSW Office of Environment and Heritage (OEH) believes it has just that, after engaging SKM and eWater CRC to develop an ecological response model within a Decision Support System (DSS) for the Lowbidgee wetlands.
The agency hopes the DSS will help it to determine how best to use available environmental entitlements and underpin future revisions to the Murrumbidgee Regulated River Water Sharing Plan.
The extended drought of recent years, the effects of river regulation, the impact of land use practices such as land clearing, burning, and cropping; declining water quality, and the impact of exotic flora and fauna (especially common carp) have all taken a toll, placing severe environmental stress on water dependent ecosystems.
The key purpose of the DSS is to compare scenarios relating to water delivery (volume, timing and duration) to ecological outcomes in order to provide a transparent and rigorous decision making process to optimise the use of environmental water.
“It is a useful tool allowing the Department to be able to apply to examine the benefits of different watering regimes, providing a level of sophistication that has never been available before,” says SKM Senior Water Resource Engineer Ian Varley.
SUPPORTING ENVIRONMENTAL DECISION MAKING ON THE LOWBIDGEE
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In September 1993, extremely poor water quality in the Berowra Creek estuary, north of Sydney, caused major red algal blooms and fish kills. The main culprits were identified as two sewage treatment Plants and polluted urban stormwater in the form of runoff from developing and newly developed residential areas in the catchment.
In an attempt to conserve the ecological value of the area’s many natural waterways, and to improve the quality of urban stormwater, Hornsby Shire Council (aka the “Bushland Shire”) has subsequently taken an integrated approach to stormwater quality management by developing a range of capital and non-capital preventative measures.
The Council uses music (model for urban stormwater improvement conceptualisation), to help it to determine the most effective water quality treatment measures to install throughout the Shire. Since music was first developed in 2001, the software has been used by thousands of professionals working in private practice and in state, regional and local government agencies throughout Australia.
For Hornsby Shire, the principal objective of installing stormwater treatment measures is to improve water quality by removing pollutants and in some instances retaining stormwater flows, says David Beharrell, Team Leader Catchments Remediation, of the Environment Division.
He says that the Shire’s challenge is to successfully reduce nutrients in receiving waters in a crowded and well populated Shire where space on Council land for stormwater quality initiatives is in short supply.
“I apply music to generate a basic stormwater model, investigating the source node, treatment node and end node to see what stormwater treatment we could expect. For example, the music model enables us to manipulate different device parameters (size, extended detention depth, filter media depth of bioretention systems) to fit a specific site and to optimise treatment performance.”
In recent years music has been used to predict the performance of proposed capital works projects, including wetlands, bioretention systems and gross pollutant traps, Beharrell says.
Where possible, the Shire also uses music when developing in-street stormwater treatment, e.g. streetscape bioretention (rain gardens) as part of local road improvement projects. “Applying music gives us an indication of the pollutant reduction we can expect from the devices we’re building. The rain gardens, while providing an environmental benefit are also aesthetically pleasing in the urban landscape.” Beharrell says.
IMPROVING WATER QUALITY IN THE BUSHLAND SHIRE
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For Ku-ring-gai Council, which manages a Local Government area 16 kilometres north of Sydney, Water Sensitive Urban Design (WSUD) has become integral to development over recent years.
For instance, since 2005 the Council has undertaken a program to implement stormwater harvesting at 11 local parks and gardens.
For many of these projects, as well as for assessing Development Applications, Council uses music (model for urban stormwater improvement conceptualisation) to help it visualise possible strategies to tackle urban stormwater hydrology and pollution impacts. Since music was first developed in 2001, the software has been used by thousands of professionals working in private practice and in State, Regional and Local government agencies throughout Australia.
“music helps us maximise performance of Council owned Water Sensitive Urban Designs and Stormwater harvesting systems” says Jay Jonasson, Environmental Engineer, Sustainability Department.
“I apply music to get a better understanding of how changes to the designs of biofiltration systems and other WSUD features impact the performance. Amongst several features, music lets me investigate the impact on performance from a change in hydraulic conductivity, size and pounding depth” Jonasson says.
Jonasson says applying music in the design of Council’s own assets and structures including rain gardens and stormwater harvesting systems, helps him test different scenarios and evaluate possible enhancements to stormwater treatment system designs.
As just one example, a couple of years ago the Council put in rain gardens on Karuah Road and music was used when designing them. Jonasson says it is always a challenge to get the best performance in a limited space. Applying music to assess the impact of changes to hydraulic conductivity proved useful in determining the optimum size of the rain gardens.
Another Council asset where music is applied is the design of stormwater harvesting systems. The Comenarra playing field is one example, where the sports field was re-surfaced and new drainage and irrigation systems were installed.
“music enabled me to assess the options for the Comenarra playing field stormwater harvesting design. With the help of music it was easy to compare different types of pre-treatments and the effect they had on stormwater quality,” Jonasson says.
“music is also a good tool to evaluate how stormwater harvesting projects may impact on other objectives, such as through reduced runoff volumes and frequencies” Jonasson says.
HARVESTING STORMWATER AT KU-RING-GAI
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On the morning of May 29, 2007, after enduring a hot and sticky night, residents in the four-million strong city of Wuxi, Jiangsu Province, on the shore of China’s Lake Tai, awoke to find their water taps emitting an intolerably foul smell.
The culprit turned out to be a massive bloom of the toxin producing cyanobacteria Microcystis spp. which was polluting China’s third largest freshwater lake – the city’s sole water supply.
Enter the Australian China Environmental Development Partnership (ACEDP), a five-year, $25m Australian Government, AusAID initiative aiming to support and enhance policy development in China in environmental protection and natural resources management.
The project is being led by China’s NDRC and lead Australian contractor is Australian Urban System (AUS) Cluster led by Earth Systems Consulting Pty Ltd.
eWater CRC was invited by Earth Systems to attend an ACEDP workshop held in China in November 2010 to promote the suite of software tools eWater are developing and demonstrate how they are being applied across Australia to assist in managing water quality issues similar to those face in Lake Tai.
The Chinese delegation was keenly interested in the eWater CRC modelling suite and as a result, eWater has been invited to undertake a pilot project in the region led by Dave Waters.
TACKLING ALGAL BLOOMS IN CHINA
The project will help the Chinese working group to construct a Source for catchments model for a pilot area within the Taihu Basin. The aim of the work is to demonstrate how to the software can be applied to establish the relative nutrient contribution from existing land uses and secondly to assess a range of improved management practices aimed at reducing nutrient export to Lake Tai.
The project will be completed by June 2012.
In support of this project, the ACEDP has established an online forum for concerned scientists and water managers involved in algal bloom management to share information and latest research, called the ‘Eutrophication Portal’.
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Covering an area of over 2,000 hectares, Caloundra South, a major Greenfield project on the Sunshine Coast of Queensland, is slated to become one of the most significant developments in South East Queensland over the next 40 years. Planned as a community of more than 20,000 homes, the development will also boast mixed-use town centres, industrial precincts and networks of public open space and vegetation corridors.
On a site traversed by three higher order waterways, the development needs to give careful consideration to a number of significant physical and biophysical constraints including flooding, important vegetation, waterways, wetlands and buffers.
To minimise the impact of the new development, the local authority stipulated it had to achieve an 80 per cent reduction in potable water consumption from (pre-millennium drought) levels. It also had to maximise the reuse and on site disposal of wastewater.
Capture and reuse of roofwater via rainwater tanks was also mandated to reduce stormwater loads on WSUD infrastructure in light of receiving water quality constraints.
To support and guide integrated water cycle (IWCM) investigations for the site, consultancy BMT WBM used Urban Developer in conjunction with other software from eWater CRC.
In order to address all requirements, BMT WBM used Urban Developer in association with Source for catchments (a water quality and quantity model designed to assist with catchment management) and eWater’s widely used stormwater-system design model, music.
Urban Developer was used to quantify lot scale water cycle processes and to assess the impacts of rainwater capture and reuse, demand management and water recycling initiatives in achieving the potable water reduction/wastewater discharge requirements. The model was forced with 10 years of local climatic and meteorological data.
“Urban Developer was extremely useful in enabling a robust and defensible understanding to be developed of IWCM processes on the site,” says BMT WBM Managing Director Tony McAlister. “Its flexibility and ease of use enabled the rapid assessment of multiple potential IWCM cases and the development of a solution for the site which satisfied all relevant requirements.”
CALOUNDRA SOUTH AND FLOOD RISK MANAGEMENT