A new approach to measuring waterway physical habitat for biota (#47)
Thom Gower
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- Streamology, Carlton North, VIC, Australia
- Why did you do it? Until recently, approaches to quantifying waterway physical form either lacked an explicit link to the needs of biota, or tended to include subjective or unrepeatable measures of geomorphic condition.
- What did you do? Streamology and Melbourne Water developed an approach to quantifying physical form in waterways, founded on the habitat requirements of key biota, and applied this to a case study of platypus habitat in Diamond Creek, Victoria.
- What have you learned? If field measurements are designed with rigour and consistency, and if the indicators used to quantify physical habitat are explicitly linked to the role they play for specific biota, then results can highlight opportunities for protecting and enhancing habitat.
- Why does it matter? This method enables repeat measurements of physical habitat in waterways, leads to an ability to track condition with time, provides stronger relationships to be drawn with biotic data, and enables habitat enhancement to be specifically developed to improve the ecology and geomorphology of waterways.
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