Eflow Projector: Assessing the performance of environmental flows (#87)
Nick Marsh
1
,
Zach Marsh
1
,
Mark Stacey
2
,
Mark Toomey
3
- Truii.com, West End, Qld, Australia
- Alluvium Consulting, Melbourne, Vic, Australia
- Victorian Environmental Water Holder, Melbourne, Vic, Australia
- The environmental water needs of most of our river systems have been quantified, and in many cases, significant water assets have been reassigned to help achieve those watering needs. How do we assess our performance as environmental water managers? Traditional approaches to assessing environmental watering performance are binary (pass or fail). This misses the subtlety of most environmental requirements. We have developed an approach to allow the scoring of partial success of environmental watering requirements and to report the proportional contribution to performance from environmental water holdings.
- We applied the method to explore the environmental watering requirements for the Victorian Environmental Water Holder’s Seasonal Watering Plan 2019-20. We used 500+ environmental flow requirements across Victoria in order to test and refine the method.
- The method is delivered as a web-based system to provide a more efficient, consistent and validated approach to assessing environmental watering performance than those used previously. A key learning from the process is the need to test widely across many flow regimes, in order to develop generalised measures that appropriately report on the multiple success factors driving environmental flow deliveries, and to reliably detect flow event start and end periods.
- Reporting the performance of watering actions enables managers to demonstrate watering program outputs and undertake rigorous trend analysis which helps us to communicate the effectiveness of environmental flows in achieving overall environmental objectives.
Download Full Paper