Murray-Darling Basin Commission Research Articles

The future for managing fishes in the Murray‐Darling Basin, south‐eastern Australia

There are few places in the world where concerns over the decline of freshwater ecosystems and their fishes are more apparent than in the Murray-Darling Basin (MDB), south-eastern Australia. The rivers of the MDB are in poor condition, and fish populations were estimated to be at 10% of pre-European levels (Murray-Darling Basin Commission 2004), with many species considered of conservation concern (Lintermans 2007). Issues regarding fish in the MDB are not new; concerns for popular commercial species such as Murray Cod were first documented over 100 years ago (Dannevig 1903), and by the late 1970s, threats to MDB fishes had been clearly identified (Cadwallader 1978). While early concerns were largely regarding commercial fisheries, the great importance of angling (Henry & Lyle 2003) and the associated socio-economic values and benefits to the recreational fishery of the MDB ($1.35 Billion direct expenditure per annum: Ernst & Young 2011), along with serious conservation concerns, are now paramount. By 2000, there was a growing sense of urgency to rehabilitate fish populations before it was too late, and this culminated in the development of the Native Fish Strategy (NFS) (Murray-Darling Basin Commission 2004), with an emphasis on rehabilitation rather than just sustainable management. Such efforts were needed to protect and restore all fishes, including those key species targeted by recreational fishers. In its first decade (2003–2013), the NFS fundamentally changed fish management in the MDB (Koehn & Lintermans 2012). This included major advances in research and management practices and advocating an overarching and achievable restoration goal to: rehabilitate native fish communities of the Basin back to 60% of their estimated pre-European levels after 50 years of implementation. This was reinforced by engagement of the community and recognition that this would take several decades to deliver. Some key achievements included the following: 1 Development, testing and implementation of one of the world’s largest fish passage programmes from Lake Hume to the Sea.

Managing climate risks in Australia: options for water policy and irrigation management

Australia, a country which suffers from recurrent droughts, is currently experiencing a shift in climate. It is often classified as the driest inhabited continent due to the extremely low annual average rainfall (465 mm) and associated low annual average runoff (57 mm). This has required a regular revision of Australia’s water policy to align with the needs of its society. Several changes in water policy have been formulated in recent times with the objective of striking a balance between the consumptive and environmental components of flows in Australian catchments. Some of the developments that affect irrigated agriculture include: (i) the Council of Australian Government’s water reforms; (ii) the Murray–Darling Basin Commission cap (the volume of water that could be diverted under 1993–94 levels of development); (iii) environmental flow rules; and (iv) the National Water Initiative. At a strategic level global climate change threatens the viability of irrigated agriculture and other industries. Under the present water reforms, longer-term water security is not guaranteed because these reforms do not explicitly take into account threats to water quantity and quality due to enhanced climate variability and change. At an operational level, current water allocation systems do not take into account state-of-the-art climate forecasting methods. Therefore, it is often not until after the irrigation season is well underway that irrigators have a reasonable knowledge of how much water will be available. Thus, there is considerable risk associated with planting and crop establishment decisions, resulting in a need for climate forecasting tools aimed at risk management. There is also a need for Australian water legislation and policy to be revisited to incorporate climate change and adaptive management options.

Vernacular heritage and evolving environmental policy in Australia: Lessons from the Murray–Darling Outreach Project

The interface between environmentalism and neoliberalism in industrialised nations is dynamic and evolving with each of these significant socio-political movements exerting influence on the other. In the context of Australian environmental policy, ideas of heritage, sense of place and belonging are increasingly invoked to support the current policy emphasis on the role of regional communities for realising goals for land and water conservation and environmental restoration. To explore the broader meaning and consequences of these developments, we focus on the manner in which ideas of heritage are employed and evoked within the Murray–Darling Outreach Project, a collaboration between the Murray–Darling Basin Commission, a key natural resource management agency, and the National Museum of Australia. The Murray–Darling Outreach Project has the aim of increasing community involvement in local environmental issues by promoting ideas of vernacular heritage.

Expanding the semiotic repertoire: Environmental communications in the primary school

This paper draws on a three-year research project about environmental communications in the primary school undertaken by university researchers in collaboration with sponsors of the Special Forever environmental communications program, the Primary English Teaching Association (PETA) and the Murray-Darling Basin Commission. I draw on one aspect of the project in particular–an investigation of what happened when primary school teachers involved in Special Forever undertook action research projects that focused on the incorporation of ‘multimodal communications’ into the curriculum as they assisted their students to build and communicate knowledge about, and take action in, their local environments. Drawing on teacher- and student-produced artefacts, and transcripts of teacher interviews and group discussions, I use the case of one classroom to illustrate some of the theoretical and practical considerations that arise when teachers attempt to expand students’ semiotic repertories to include not only alphabetic literacy in print, but also competencies with other forms of meaning-making and media, as tools for learning in and about the environment, and for communicating that learning to real audiences inside and outside schools.

The Environmental Stewardship System (ESS): a generic system for assuring rural environmental performance

The Environmental Stewardship System (ESS) is proposed as a generic assurance system for demonstrating environmental performance. It incorporates Environmental Management Systems (EMS) and is matched to natural resources management (NRM) and catchment targets. ESS is a framework for aligning and clarifying environmental objectives and targets across scales. It operates at the catchment and farm levels, interdependently, focusing on the main industries, mainstream farming methods and whole-farm business management. For farmers, it provides a staged pathway of increasing levels of performance and audit process that they can progress along, up to full ISO 14001. It is a modular system that is expandable to suit the particular operational needs of land managers, industries and catchment agencies. ESS is an inclusive framework for integrating various industry farm management improvement schemes and other management requirements. It is an auditable system to provide recognition to land managers who deliver environmental stewardship. The ESS was developed from the findings of the Murray–Darling Basin Commission’s Watermark Environmental Stewardship Project. By addressing the four major deficiencies in current arrangements for NRM delivery (the Stewardship Standard is poorly defined at the Murray–Darling Basin and at the local scales; reporting of outcomes is poorly aligned across scales; and auditing arrangements are not integrated) ESS has the potential to significantly improve the delivery of NRM within Australia, when the drivers for uptake are strong enough. In particular, it would reinforce and elaborate the Australian regional NRM delivery model at the subregional scale. The ESS provides a national framework for assured agricultural production and rural land management. It is in the public domain for others to draw from or adopt.

Sensitivity and structure assessment of a software tool to gauge the ecological impact of flow scenarios

Several generic problems in sensitivity assessment (SA) of large simulation models employed for decision support are examined by reference to the Murray flow assessment tool (MFAT), software used by the Murray-Darling Basin Commission to help to gauge the ecological effects of alternative flow-management strategies in the River Murray in SE Australia. Sensitivity assessment of the MFAT imposes demands common to SA of many large simulation models, namely avoidance of excessive computing demand, examination of aggregation rules for results which are dispersed spatially, temporally and over types of items, and presentation of results in sufficiently reduced form for easy assimilation without losing important detail. Computing demands are minimised by exploiting the relatively simple structure of the software to analyse much of its sensitivity behaviour algebraically, including the propagation of sensitivities through successive stages of aggregation. Some alternative aggregation formulae are reviewed in terms of their sensitivity properties. A simple scheme for presenting sensitivity results in reduced form, initially as histograms or sets of quantiles, then as classified frequencies of occurrence of significant sensitivities, are illustrated with SA results from the component of the MFAT concerning habitat condition for fish.

‘Committing to Place’ at the Local Scale: the potential of youth education programs for promoting community participation in regional natural resource management

Emerging approaches to environmental governance require a greater level of community participation than did previous approaches in which these responsibilities largely rested with government agencies. There is consequently a need for increased engagement with NRM among a broad community sector. This paper examines initiatives by two prominent government agencies, the Murray–Darling Basin Commission (MDBC) and the National Museum of Australia (NMA), to engage school children from regional communities using education programs that focus on place and environmental health. We focus on the MDBC's International Riverhealth Conference held in Mildura in 2003 and the associated Murray–Darling Basin TalkBack Classroom sponsored by the NMA and the Parliamentary Education Office (PEO). We explore how key themes of local scale, place-based identities, youth voice and critical engagement are developed in these programs and consider how they relate to the environmental agency of children. We then reflect on the potential for the kinds of environmental agency promoted through these programs to help build the capacity of local communities to progress larger goals of environmental restoration and sustainability in the Murray–Darling Basin. The evaluation research reported here forms part of the Committing to Place research project, an Australian Research Council Linkage grant involving the University of Tasmania, the National Museum of Australia and the Murray–Darling Basin Commission.

Instream NanoTEM: providing increased resolution to stream salinisation and floodplain processes along the River Murray, southeast Australia

Increasing salinity in the River Murray is well documented and is of concern environmentally, economically and socially. The Murray Darling Basin Commission and the Mallee Catchment Management Authority engaged the authors to collect base-line in-stream NanoTEM data within the River Murray from Lock 1 to Mallee Cliffs (675 km). This is a new application of a high resolution fast sampling Transient Electro-Magnetic (TEM) system, towed behind a boat, taking soundings every seven to ten metres along the river. The observed NanoTEM response was interpreted against the current understanding of the regional hydrogeology and groundwater processes in and around the river. This paper summarises some of the results from this investigation. The observed response correlates strongly with previously mapped major changes in underlying lithostratigraphy along the Murray River, and with gaining and losing reaches of the river. The extensive length of the survey provides an insight into potential interactions between the river, floodplain and groundwater, but does not replace the need for focussed ground-truthing programs to examine specific correlations. This rapid, portable technique should be applicable outside the Murray-Darling Basin as well as at additional locations within the Basin.

"COMMITTING TO PLACE" AND EVALUATING THE HIGHER PURPOSE: INCREASING ENGAGEMENT IN NATURAL RESOURCE MANAGEMENT THROUGH MUSEUM OUTREACH AND EDUCATIONAL ACTIVITIES

The Australian "Committing to Place" Research Project investigates the potential of outreach activities and educational programmes to increase community commitment to natural resource management. New communication technologies offer tools for enhancing participation — in terms of a deeper commitment from communities and participation of a wider range of groups — through their interactive qualities and capacity to link people in different places. The research project evaluates the piloting, by the National Museum of Australia, of several innovative outreach activities which use information and communication technologies specifically for community capacity building and developing platforms for change. With an understanding of evaluation as research to inform decision-making at all phases of project design, the Research Team is evaluating: (1) the effectiveness of each outreach activity in meeting stakeholder objectives, including community participants; (2) the potential each activity has to increase participation in the activity and other activities associated with cultural heritage or natural resources; and (3) progress towards "the higher purpose", that is, the potential for such activities to affect natural resource management outcomes in the long run. The research project is an Australian Research Council Linkage Grant involving the University of Tasmania, the National Museum of Australia, and the Murray–Darling Basin Commission.

How restoration in marine and other aquatic environments differs from on land

How restoration in marine and other aquatic environments differs from on land

The use of modelling and reuse techniques in the development of water management systems in basins with limited water resources

Drawing on experiences in New South Wales from 1950 to 1980 in modeling and re-use techniques in the development of desalination technology and its application in fresh water production for potable use, the paper describes how Australia realized its responsibilities in developing participative and sustainable approaches to land use and water resources management. An analysis of the lessons from the operation of the Bayswater zero-discharge power station significantly contributed to the debate on sustainable approaches, highlighting that no management policy of a water basin can be implemented without a model based on reliable data from all sectors (including the environment), and no management model can be implemented without the participation of all stakeholders. These ideals were reflected in the conception and establishment of the Murray-Darling Basin Commission. The Commission succeeded in bringing together all major stakeholders in this huge basin, though it took more than 15 years to do so. While widely recognized as one of the most advanced and successful experiences in integrated management of a drainage basin, it has still not achieved the reversal of many unsustainable agricultural practices, giving a clear indication of the difficulties and time required for producing sustainable solutions.

Barmah-Millewa forest environmental water allocation

The formal allocation of water for the environment is a developing area of river management both scientifically and in terms of community participation. This case study, illustrating the recent use of the Barmah-Millewa Forest Environmental Water Allocation (EWA), provides a practical demonstration of community participation in environmental water management, the application of hydrological and biological "triggers" and a positive, demonstrable biological outcome from an environmental water allocation. The Barmah-Millewa Forest covers an area of 70,000 ha across the floodplain of the Murray River, upstream of the town of Echuca. About half the forest is in NSW (Millewa) and half is in Victoria (Barmah). The Barmah Forest is a Wetland of International Importance listed under the Convention on Wetlands - Ramsar Convention. The forest is the largest river redgum forest in the world. The natural flooding cycle associated with the forest has been significantly altered by regulation of the Murray River--impacting upon the overall health of the forest ecosystem. Recognising this, the Murray Darling Basin Commission developed a water management strategy for the forest to enhance forest, fish and wildlife values. To implement this strategy, between 1990 and 1993 reports were completed and community consultation took place. In 1993 the Murray Darling Basin Ministerial Council approved allocation of 100 Gigalitres of water per year, provided in equal shares by NSW and Victoria, to meet the needs of the forest ecosystem and in 1994 the Barmah-Millewa Forum was established under the Murray-Darling Basin Agreement. The vision for the Forum is to maintain and, where possible, improve the ecological and productive sustainability of the Barmah-Millewa Forest and to establish a planning and operational framework to better meet the flooding and drying requirements of the riparian forests and wetlands. Between October 2000 and January 2001 the Barmah-Millewa Forest Environmental Water Allocation was used for the second time. A total of 341 GL was released as an EWA. This amount represented only 8% of the total flows downstream of Yarrawonga Weir from September 2000 and January 2001. The strategic use of the relatively small amount of water enabled flooding to be maintained and ensured significant breeding success for water birds and other biota in the Forest.

Indicators of sustainable development for catchment management in South Africa - Review of indicators from around the world

Indicators are the ideal means by which progress towards sustainable development can be measured. However, most indicator initiatives throughout the world have been aimed at state-of-the-environment reporting, with relatively few aimed at developing sectoral indicators. This paper provides the results of a review to establish trends in the development of indicators that assist in integrated water resource management. Twenty-one organisations from around the world were approached with regard to whether they had developed indicators of sustainable development for catchment management. Of these, only five organisations had developed, or were in the process of developing, indicator sets that were available for review. These included the Fraser Basin Council (Canada), the Murray-Darling Basin Commission (Australia), the Tennessee Valley Authority (USA), the United States Environmental Protection Agency and the World Resources Institute. All of these indicator sets were developed using an issuesbased approach. Each indicator set was unique, reflecting the policy, both national and organisational, upon which it had been based. An analysis of these five indicator sets revealed that the most important themes that required information for water resource management at a catchment level, were biodiversity and ecosystem integrity, land-use change, water quality, waste production, water availability and resource use. Common indicators included population growth; community involvement; water availability; water use; water quality trends; soil contamination; non-compliance; species at risk; key species assessment; change in vegetation; agricultural impact; access to recreational opportunities, and ecosystem health. The identification of these themes and common indicators will be useful for the development of indicators for catchment management in South Africa. More importantly, policy frameworks and the physical characteristics of catchment systems in the country need to be taken into account. Additionally, it is recognised that no effective indicator set can be developed without the input of stakeholders. WaterSA Vol.27(4) 2001: 539-550

Modelling river and floodplain interactions for ecological response

The study of “environmental flows”—selecting regulated flow regions that support aspects of the biotic and abiotic environment—has received increasing attention in the Murray-Darling Basin during the 1990s. The Basin contains a large number of dams, weirs, and levee banks which have changed the nature of instream and floodplain habitat by altering the time-varying depth of river channels and the frequency and duration of floodplain inundation. The ability to model water movement between the instream and floodplain is fundamental for assessing the quality of aquatic habitat for riverine biota, particularly floodplain vegetation and waterbirds. Precise hydraulic modelling of these relationships is difficult because of the lack of appropriately scaled information to describe floodplain topography and surface roughness, both of which vary in space and time. This paper describes a framework to allow simple modelling of average water depth and flood duration in floodplain environments using a partial water balance. Water bodies are defined as a one-dimensional storage representing the quantity of water in the storage per unit time. The storages are filled and drained by conceptual pipes that have a given discharge per unit time. Pipes have a limited capacity and a position along the storage vertical axis which determines the threshold when water is released along the pipe and in what quantity. Each storage has an exponential decay (loss) term and a maximum capacity. Water that is passed to a storage which has reached its maximum capacity is discarded, which means that there is no attempt to balance the water over the whole system. This simplification allows the framework to be easily set up yet still model properties of interest. Pipes are connected between storages to move water around the landscape. A storage may have many input and output pipes. For example, losses to groundwater and evapotranspiration may be represented using an output pipe that is not connected to another storage, or may be associated with the decay term. This approach allows mixed scale representations and incremental improvements to modelled water behaviour without changing the underlying structure of the system. This framework is one component of an environmental flows decision support system being developed by CSIRO Land and Water, Environment Canada, and the Murray-Darling Basin Commission. The modelling of vegetation habitat is used to illustrate the approach.

Streamflow modelling on a subdaily time step in the Upper Murray Basin

This paper describes the results of rainfall-runoff modelling for ten catchments in the Upper Murray Basin (Basin 401) of the Murray Darling drainage division (MDDD), Australia. The outflows of these catchments are used by the Murray Darling Basin Commission for operational management of the Hume and Dartmouth Lakes, two of Australia's four largest reservoirs. Previous results [1–4] have demonstrated that the conceptual, lumped parameter, rainfall-runoff model IHACRES provides a good approximation to the daily measured flow in several basins of the MDDD. The major aim of the research described in this paper is the identification of models based on a shorter four-hourly sampling interval. Further in [5], these identified models are used in a Kalman filter-based forecasting framework to allow real-time forecasts of streamflow in these catchments.

Temperate Pasture Sustainability Key Program: an overview

This special edition of the Australian Journal of Experimental Agriculture presents papers from work undertaken as part of the Temperate Pasture Sustainability Key Program (TPSKP; see Fig. 1), and presented at a workshop in Sydney in November 1997. TPSKP was initiated by Meat and Livestock Australia (MLA). The Land and Water Resources Research and Development Corporation, the International Wool Secretariat and the Murray Darling Basin Commission were joint funders of some of the individual projects. Most projects were carried out on private properties, and many had producer groups associated with the sites to provide input into treatment selections as well as management guidance and support. This substantial producer input was provided free to the program. The success of TPSKP relied heavily on physical and financial support from State departments of agriculture and conservation, CSIRO and universities, and also on the enthusiasm of these groups to work collaboratively across the 4 south-eastern states. One of the key results of this cooperation was the development of a set of experimental protocols so that measurements taken anywhere in TPSKP could be directly compared. TPSKP aimed to develop the principles for manipulating pasture composition to make grazing systems more productive and sustainable. The program priorities were to: (i) determine by survey the attitudes of producers to grazing management and identify the characteristics of those producers most likely to adopt the program results; (ii) demonstrate by June 1996 that potentially responsive perennial grass-based pastures could be upgraded using grazing management to become a ‘desirable’ pasture for animal production and sustainability; (iii) demonstrate by June 1996 that newly sown perennial grass-based pastures could be maintained in a desirable condition using grazing management; (iv) determine the critical factors responsible for the capacity of perennial grasses to persist, respond to drought, and ameliorate land degradation; (v) develop producers’ skills in pasture species identification, pasture and animal assessment, and feed budgeting, both to enhance their existing management, and to ‘prime’ them for the outputs from TPSKP; (vi) to demonstrate (in phase 2) that improvements in pasture composition and grazing management can have both economic and environmental benefits.

Effective Multi-Jurisdictional River Basin Management

Hydrologic data collection is an important aspect of multi-jurisdictional river basin management. The Murray-Darling Basin Commission in Australia, and the Mekong River Commission in southeast Asia, are structured similarly and have established similarly structured monitoring networks. The efficiency and effectiveness of these two networks differ however. The reasons for the differences are examined, and it is concluded that contrasting socio-economic development provides only part of the explanation. The technical capacity of each organisations member states, the extent each organisation depends on its own databases and the developmental stage of each organisation itself are also critically important.

Lessons from Recent Evaluations of Natural Resource Management Programs in Australia

There has been very little published about evaluations of natural resource management programs in Australia. This situation reduces information transfer between program managers and evaluators and increases the likelihood that past mistakes will be repeated. In this paper the authors reflect upon their recent experience with evaluations of the Murray-Darling Basin Commission's (MDBC) Riverine Environment Investigation and Education program and the Commonwealth Department of Primary Industries and Energy (DPIE) Farm Forestry Program. While the programs resulted in significant outcomes, they varied in the soundness of program logic. About a quarter of the projects in both programs performed poorly. Concerns about program logic and its implementation, and with program and project management are explored where these have wider relevance to natural resource policy development, program management and evaluation. Suggestions are made about the key elements required in evaluations of natural resource management programs.

A combined deterministic and self-adaptive stochastic algorithm for streamflow forecasting with application to catchments of the Upper Murray Basin, Australia

This paper describes the results of runoff modelling for nine catchments of the Upper Murray Basin (Basin 401) of the Murray-Darling Drainage Division (MDDD), Australia. The work aimed firstly to provide adequate models for long-term streamflow prediction in nine catchments of this Basin feeding the Hume and Dartmouth reservoirs. The development and testing of flow forecasting algorithms for operational management by the Murray-Darling Basin Commission was another purpose of the work reported here. The conceptual lumped parameter rainfall-runoff model IHACRES (Jakeman et al., 1990, 1993; Jakeman and Hornberger, 1993) was selected as the modelling tool for streamflow prediction in the catchments. The conceptual rainfall-runoff model IHACRES (with a snow melt/formation module in snow-affected catchments) and a selfadaptive linear filtering approach for the IHACRES residuals were combined and applied for forecasting daily streamflow in the Upper Murray Basin catchments. Different orders of AutoRegressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) models for the residuals were considered in order to select the most appropriate forecasting algorithm. Linear filtering of the conceptual model residuals provides considerable improvement in forecasting for both low and high values of streamflow for developing the operational streamflow forecast system.

Population dynamics of Aulacoseira granulata (EHR.) SIMONSON (Bacillariophyceae, Centrales), the dominant alga in the Murray River, Australia

Temporal and spatial changes in the population of Aulacoseira granulata, the dominant alga within the Murray River (south-eastern Australia), are described utilizing weekly data (1980-1992) from the algal, water quality and flow monitoring programs of the Murray-Darling Basin Commission. The population dynamics of A. granulata are related to flow conditions, turbidity and silica concentrations. Diatoms (A. granulata and other centric species) were the most abundant algae during the 12 years of phytoplankton record for the upper and central reaches of the Murray River, with A. granulata occurring at up to 77,700 cells/ml. In the slower flowing, lower reaches of the river, centric diatoms other than A. granulata occurred most frequently, followed by Scenedesmus spp., while A. granulata occurred intermittently at high densities. Turbidity values within the river generally ranged from 5-80 NTU (maximum value 470 NTU). Silica concentrations were generally 2-6 mg/l (maximum value 44.5 mg/l), but values less than 0.1 mg/l were not uncommon. The population dynamics of A. granulata were most strongly related to flow and silica concentration. In the upper half of the river, cell densities were reduced dramatically by floods or silica depletion but a substantial population was usually present under median discharge conditions, on some occasions when the silica concentration was less than 0.1 mg/l, A. granulata was less prevalent in the more slowly flowing lower parts of the river (the lower Murray is controlled by a lock and weir system), reaching high cell densities for short periods only when flow conditions provided sufficient turbulence, and never exhausting the supply of silica. The higher turbidities found in the lower parts of the river (median values around 60 NTU) appeared to impact significantly on cell densities only when above 100 NTU. The findings are discussed in relation to the known meroplanktonic lifestyle of A. granulata.