Posted 19 May 2009
Gregory River, Queensland (credit: Bob Beale)
Research has discovered flow regimes in Australia's rivers follow twelve distinct patterns, suggesting that insights and lessons learnt in one river or region can be validly transferred to another that follows the same pattern.
In a project funded by Land & Water Australia's Innovation Program, Dr Brad Pusey of Griffith University and team developed a continental-scale regional classification of Australia's rivers based on ecologically relevant aspects of their hydrology.
The information gathered in the project will benefit aquatic scientists and natural resource managers alike. A well-defined hydrological classification/regionalisation framework provides an objective framework to help improve our understanding of the relationship between hydrology and ecology. Fundamentally useful for regionally relevant analyses of environmental flows and for examining changes in flow regimes, the findings could also link with a range of other studies, including those related to ecosystem production or foodweb dynamics, distribution of biodiversity, and spatial variation in ecological traits.
The project has also added a spatial framework of streams and nested catchments and a data matrix of hydrological units by landscape attributes, to the 9 second Digital Elevation Model (DEM) of Australia.
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Professor Andy Baker features in American Water Resources Association ‘Water Resources Impact’, September 2020 edition.
The Connected Waters Initiative (CWI) is pleased to welcome Taylor Coyne to its network as a postgraduate researcher. If you’re engaged in research at a postgraduate level, and you’re interested in joining the CWI network, get in touch! The CWI network includes multidisciplinary researchers across the Schools of Engineering, Sciences, Humanities and Languages and Law.
The Grand Challenge on Rapid Urbanisation will establish Think Deep Australia, led by Dr Marilu Melo Zurita, to explore how we can use our urban underground spaces for community benefit.
On the 21 August 2020, CWI researchers made a submission to the National Water Reform Inquiry, identifying priority areas and making a number of recommendations as to how to achieve a sustainable groundwater future for Australia.
Results published from a research project between the Land Development Department (LDD) Thailand and UNSW has demonstrated how 2-dimensional mapping can be used to understand soil salinity adjacent to a earthen canal in north east Thailand (Khongnawang et al. 2020).