Water: Science and Solutions for Australia

Water: Science and Solutions for Australia provides the latest information about the status of Australia’s water resources and their future prospects, the many values we hold for water, and the potential for using water more effectively to meet the growing demands of cities, farmers, industries, and the environment.  The book has been edited by Dr Ian Prosser and I was fortunate enough to help out with the development of the publication when the team were planning how to approach this topic.

The publication draws upon the scientific literature to provide a broader audience with a clear picture of the water challenges and prospects facing Australia.  Written by scientists and practitioners it seeks to provide a bridge from the peer-reviewed scientific literature to a broader audience of society, while providing the depth of science that this complex issue demands and deserves.

The book has been written so that it is accessible to all and can be used to underpin decisions that need to be made in business, in government, and in general to respond to the challenges of water resource management.

You can download the book from the  CSIRO Publishing website as:

• Portable Document Format [PDF 28 MB] [optimised for computer screen but takes a while to download so I suggest following this link where you can download individual chapters of the book]
• EPUB version from CSIRO PUBLISHING [optimised for use with mobile and eReading devices],

Hard copies of Water: Science and Solutions for Australia are also available on our CSIRO PUBLISHING website. Includes ISBN and full bibliographic information.

Many congratulations to the CSIRO team that put this publication together, in particular, Ian Prosser, Mary Mulcahy and Bill Young.

Siwan

Free Flow blog for online conversations with the MDBA

Congratulations to the MDBA for launching their new blog ‘Free Flow’.  It is hoped that the blog will be a place for open online conversations with the MDBA where anyone can ask questions and discuss the draft Basin Plan.  When launching the blog the MDBA went on the record as saying:

“We want to get real conversations going. This blog is a different approach to what we’ve done in the past and people’s comments will go straight up without our seeing them.  But we will get involved in the conversation.”

Please let others know about the blog and encourage people who wish to contribute to ‘join in the conversation’.

The blog is available at http://freeflow.mdba.gov.au.
Siwan

Risks to managing water resources in the Murray-Darling Basin

Over the past few years I have been fortunate enough to be part of an Expert Panel providing advice to the Murray-Darling Basin Authority on a portfolio of work examining risks to managing water resources in the MDB. The Risk Assessment Section within MDBA’s Natural Resources Management Division has funded a suite of projects to investigate:

1. risks driven by climate change (eg: drought, bushfire, salinity dynamics);
2. risks relating to catchment processes (eg: forest hydrology, afforestation, invasive species, floodplain dynamics, land use); and
3. risks arising from direct water interception and use (eg: current management arrangements).

I have read all the reports from this research invesment and the findings and knowledge gained from these projects are enlightening.  We can now understand the likely impacts of these risks, the likelihood of their occurrence and their consequences.  This should enable us to develop better management strategies for the future.

We have provided a brief summary of each of these reports and a hotlink through to the complete research final report, we hope you get a lot out of reading, distilling and applying this knowledge to your situation.  We are also very happy to put more links into any other resources you think are useful for this topic, which ties in very well with the theme for the Australian Stream Management Conference 2012 of Managing for Extremes.  Click here to go through to our new managing risks resources.

Siwan

Hawkesbury Nepean River Recovery Program (HNRRP) final e-news September 2011

After just over two years of very intensive activity, the Hawkesbury-Nepean River Recovery Program (HNRRP) is coming to an end, having successfully delivered its intended outcomes on time and under budget. The final edition of HNRRP e-news reflects on some of the major achievements from the seven HNRRP projects and celebrates the great work that has been done to improve the health of the Hawkesbury-Nepean catchment. The Hawkesbury-Nepean river system frames the western edge of the Sydney Basin and is one of New South Wales’ most important natural assets.

In Search of the Trout Cod

Siwan and I are very fortunate to be working with the Native Fish Strategy at the Murray Darling Basin Authority on a project involving Will Trueman (researcher and author) and Richard Snashall (film maker).

Will has undertaken an incredible piece of research, over many many years, into the status of native fish in the lower Murray Darling. Will has successfully combined the science, the historical records (newspapers, books and photographs) and anecdotes (oral histories) from sometimes very elderly residents of the region, to show just how prevalent the Trout Cod, Murray Cod, Macquarie Perch and many other native fish were in the 1860s up to the present day.

Will has done an exceptional job of combining science and story to create an accurate record of the status of native fish in the basin over the last 150+ years. He has also drawn on the writings of Mary Gilmore which are absolutely fascinating (more on this in later blogs) and now I find I am also reading all these wonderful accounts of early Australia. Using this variety of information he has created a captivating history of the loss of native fish from the region and what may have caused some of these losses.

The products of this project will include the full publication which will be submitted to the legal deposit libraries across Australia as a research record; a series of catchment by catchment publications, a web site with links to all the information; and several videos of Will sharing the stories and science that make up this amazing project. I was particularly impressed to hear that Will used Trove at the National Library of Australia to access the old newspaper records.  He told us that this research made up 30% of his primary source material and he could not have undertaken the level of research without having access to Trove.

I am particularly taken with this newspaper article about the size and aggression of the Trout Cod which Will found in the Trove database.

Adelaide Register, 20 May 1892

Murray Fish and their Habits (From our own correspondent) Blanchetown, May 15.

The Murray cod may be caught from one – quarter of an inch in length to over 100 lb. in weight. / A young German, an assistant at a wool washing establishment about five miles from here, was in a habit of bathing off the stage, and one day while having his usual dip sat on the stage with his feet swaying to and fro in the water, when a cod seized his foot, at the same time nearly forcing him off the stage into the water, the German having his foot severely scarred by the teeth of the cod. Some time elapsed before he recovered. At Weston’s Flat, a short distance above Morgan, the residents were in the habit of swimming their stock across the river for feed, and while swimming one of the horses it turned on one side, and with difficulty the boatman towed it to the shore, and with aid of blocks and tackle hauled him onto dry land, when, to their surprise, a huge cod had the horse’s foot in his mouth. The cod was captured, and weighed over 90 lb. Without doubt in some of the numerous cases of drowning, where good swimmers have disappeared, they have had a tussle with one of these “monsters of the deep.” 

This is just one sample of the newspaper articles collected by Will in his research.  The anecdotes collected from the fishermen are even more fascinating, but you will have to wait for the publication (expected by the end of 2011) for more.

Nerida