Developing a real-time ecological forecast for the Northern Murray-Darling Basin

The last 20 years have seen the Murray-Darling basin under increased environmental stress due to land clearing, flow alteration, increased water allocations, and the growing impacts of climate change. Policy measures have been established to address this problem (e.g. The Water Act, The Basin Plan). However, the management of environmental water allocations remains a challenging task that requires estimates of current and future water availability, as well as an understanding of how environmental water releases will impact ecosystem health. Currently available environmental modelling is not well suited to support these day-to-day management decisions as the focus is predominantly on long-term environmental outcomes. There is a need for real-time predictive ecological models that operate at a shorter forecast horizon to directly meet the needs of environmental managers. This project aims to develop the science which would underpin a real-time ecological forecast for the Northern Murray-Darling Basin. 

Our aim is to develop a real-time ecological forecasting service in the Northern Murray-Darling Basin built on top of existing hydrological services such as the Australian Water Outlook (https://awo.bom.gov.au/) operated by the Bureau of Meteorology. The new service will output estimated ecological health indices with fully specified uncertainties. The Northern Basin includes significant environmental assets and is an important part of overall basin management, yet has received relatively little attention from the scientific community. Based on modelling work undertaken by the ANU and CSIRO, the project will focus on vegetation in the Narran Lakes, a site of high ecological and cultural value, which has been the focus of previous comparable research.

This research will also link to a study of the impact of water quality on small, rural communities in the region. These communities have a substantial Indigenous population and have a low socioeconomic status. Community water concerns include access to potable water as well as water suitable for washing, cooking and bathing. The aim is to develop integrated water quality-health models to project future water quality conditions (with confidence intervals) for selected locations. Improved flow and ecological forecasting developed in the project will be an important contribution to this research.