Development of a Framework for the Sustainable Rivers Audit: A report to the Murray Darling Basin Commission

Dyer, Fiona | Conceptual models

Home

List of Titles

Add to Quick Collection

Files

Download Report (Adobe Acrobat PDF, 4 MB)

Permanent link to this page: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.9/523459

3583 Visitors

3925 Hits

49 Downloads

Title: Development of a Framework for the Sustainable Rivers Audit: A report to the Murray Darling Basin Commission
Creator: Whittington, John
Creator: Coysh, Julie
Creator: Davies, P.
Creator: Dyer, Fiona
Creator: Gawne, Ben
Creator: Lawrence, Ian
Creator: Liston, Peter
Creator: Norris, Richard
Creator: Robinson, Wayne
Creator: Thoms, Martin
Subject: 270000 Biological Sciences
Subject: Sustainable Rivers Audit
Subject: Murray-Darling Basin
Subject: rivers
Subject: health
Subject: Conceptual models
Date: 2001
Publisher: Murray-Darling Freshwater Research Centre
Description: "August 2001".
Project no.: Development of a Framework for the Sustainable Rivers Audit - Project R2004
Publication no.: CRCFE Technical Report 8/2001
Description: MDFRC item.
Description: Preamble The Sustainable Rivers Audit (Audit) is being established to overcome the lack of consistent and detailed information on the health of the Murray-Darling Basin’s rivers. At the Basin scale this lack of information has made it difficult to identify the effectiveness of land and water management or justify major policy initiatives aimed at improving the riverine environment. With water becoming an increasingly scarce and valuable resource, the Basin community seeks assurance that water is being managed according to the principles of ecologically sustainable development. The Audit is being designed to be an annual and comprehensive five-yearly review of the condition of waterways, to inform debate among the Basin community. The Audit will assist the setting and monitoring of valley targets for catchment and river health and provide a trigger to review threats to the rivers of the Basin and, where appropriate, review management actions required to address these threats. Approach Key challenges for the Audit are to assess the existing health of the Basin’s rivers, to detect trends in health through time and predict the long-term ecological consequences of these changes. To meet these challenges, the assessment framework recognises the critical elements and processes that contribute to river health, and develops indices to describe them. Conceptual models of river function have been developed to identify these elements and processes and to assist with the development of indicators. These functional models are based on geomorphic divisions of the river valleys. To detect long-term changes ongoing funding must be committed to the Audit for sampling and reporting repeatedly over a long time-scale. The Audit framework recommends river health be synonymous with ecological integrity, and that river health be measured as the degree to which aquatic ecosystems sustain processes and communities of organisms and habitats relative to the species composition, diversity, and functional organisation of natural habitats within a region. Therefore, the framework has adopted a referential approach for assessing river health for all indicators, where existing site condition is assessed relative to the expected natural condition at that site. The use of a referential approach does not equate with the objective of returning rivers to a pristine condition. It is up to the community to choose both an acceptable level of condition and an appropriate target for river condition. Targets for river health are being developed for the Murray-Darling Basin as part of the Ministerial Council’s ICM Strategy, 'ICM in the Murray-Darling Basin 2001–2010 -Delivering a Sustainable Future’ (MDBMC 2001). There are several State and national programs that report river health in the Murray- Darling Basin. However, existing programs do not fully satisfy the information and reporting requirements of the proposed Audit. A lack of uniformity in assessments and reporting between jurisdictions does not generally allow Basin-wide inter-valley comparisons. Very few programs have on-going funding commitment. Many of the sites in existing programs were selected for monitoring the impacts of specific operations and so cannot be used to provide an unbiased assessment of river health at the valley scale. Consequently, while the Audit attempts to build on available data, the collection and analyses of appropriate data will require significant investment in new sites. The Audit framework recognises biota (fish and macroinvertebrates) and biological processes as the fundamental measures of river health and has developed indices for these. The hierarchical model of river health adopted in the proposed framework predicts that the biota are influenced by the condition of landscape and local features within the catchment. Hydrological, habitat and water quality indices have been developed to assess the condition of the landscape and local features that influence the biotic indices. Environmental Themes Protocols have been developed for the following environmental themes; all are based on a referential approach where existing condition is expressed as a difference from natural condition. The environmental themes for which indicators were to be developed were specified in the Project Brief. --Macroinvertebrate Index - it is proposed that AUSRIVAS O/E taxa, using existing models, be used in the first year of sampling and that a more robust form of SIGNAL be developed. After that, scores for both AUSRIVAS O/E taxa and SIGNAL can be used to derive the macroinvertebrate score. To report at the river valley scale it is recommended that the macroinvertebrate index be assessed annually at 30 sites per river valley. --Fish Index - it is proposed that a fish bioassessment protocol be developed as an integral part of the Audit. Much of the background work required to develop a standardised methodology has been done. However, several aspects still require completion and evaluation. This will require dedicated funding and ongoing coordination during the first five-year term. This development can be done as part of the proposed Pilot Audit. --Water Quality Index - it is recommended that two types of physical and chemical water quality indicators of river health be measured: potential modifiers of ecological processes (flow, temperature, SS, nutrients (TP, TN), salinity) and indicators of outcomes of ecological processes (TOC and composition, DO, pH and chlorophyll 'a', alkalinity, residual nutrients (NOx, NH4, DRP)). Reference condition would be based on flow duration condition comparable to that prevailing at the test site at the time of sampling. To report at the river-valley scale it is recommended that the water quality index be assessed annually with 4–6 sampling occasions per year at 18 sites per river valley. --Hydrology Index - it is recommended that a hydrological index be defined in terms of four sub-indices: Mean Annual Flow, Flow Duration Curve Difference Index, Seasonal Amplitude Index, and Seasonal Period. The hydrology index would then be defined as the Euclidean Distance between unimpacted hydrology condition and the condition defined by the four sub-indices in a four-dimensional space. It would be expressed on a scale of 0–1, with 1 being unimpacted. It is recommended that the hydrological index be calculated at least once in each five-year period, with significant events (e.g. significant new infrastructure or environmental releases) triggering a new assessment of the hydrology index. --Physical Habitat Index - it is recommended that physical habitat be assessed at three spatial scales: floodplain (km), channel feature (100 m) and in-channel patches (1 m). The assessment protocol uses a combination of remote sensing and field data collection. The major habitat categories include the vegetation and the geomorphological, and hydraulic characteristics of each habitat type. The protocol includes a separate assessment of processes that either maintain or degrade physical habitat, such as erosion or isolation. An O/E score will be generated for each spatial scale using the E-Ball technique, which requires development. To report at the river valley scale it is proposed that physical habitat be assessed once every five years at 20 sites per river valley. Reporting Scales Natural resource management at the Basin scale requires information on resource condition to be measured and reported at a commensurate scale. The Audit framework is designed to report health at the river-valley scale; Cap compliance is reported at a similar scale. The Audit framework is also designed to report river health within river-valley scales. These reporting scales are defined by areas along a river with similar geomorphology and hydrology. For example, the Valley Process Zone scale reports river health for the upper, mid-slopes and the lowland parts of the river separately. The study design developed for the Audit does not report river condition at a site. Site Selection It is recommended that the Audit should be based on a stratified random sampling design, stratified by geomorphological characteristics (Valley Process Zones). The allocation of sites to Valley Process Zones will be catchment area weighted, which will result in approximately 70% of sites occurring in the lowland parts of the Basin’s rivers. It is recommended that reference sites for each environmental theme be selected (where possible) from the existing pool of 300 reference sites identified for the First National Assessment of River Health (FNARH). The study design described in this report is efficient with respect to the total number of sites sampled; however, it is acknowledged that it will often not be possible to reconcile existing monitoring stations with this approach. There will inevitably be pressure to compromise on the 'randomness’ of sites to include existing sampling stations, and indeed this may be a sensible approach. However, this will impact to varying levels on the precision of the assessment. This report recommends that the Independent Sustainable Rivers Audit Group (ISRAG) review the site selection process undertaken by the jurisdictions as part of the Pilot (and prior to sampling) to ensure a workable compromise between the recommended study design and existing monitoring stations. Sampling Intensity The number of samples required and the frequency of sampling are driven by a number of factors including the magnitude of the desired detectable change, the confidence in detecting that change, the initial condition score, the variability in the indicator and the reporting scale. Existing data sets, augmented with modelled data, have been used to determine the number of samples required to detect a recommended change of 10% for habitat (20 sites per river valley) and macroinvertebrates (30 sites per river valley), and 20% for water quality (18 sites per river valley) with a power of 0.8 (80% chance of detecting a difference) and significance level of 0.1 (a 90% chance of drawing the correct conclusion) in each index at the river-valley scale. Interpretation It is recommended that environmental theme scores for individual sites be aggregated to the reporting scale using two types of statistics: averages and proportions. The aggregated environmental theme score can be reported as a median with the 25th and 75th percentiles. The percentiles would indicate the condition of the best and worst quarter of sites in the river valley thus giving an indication of the range of scores for that indicator. The aggregated environmental theme score may also be reported as a proportion of sites impaired. Because of the sample design, this statistic can be interpreted as the proportion of that river valley that is 'impaired’ for each environmental theme. Reporting a proportion of impairment requires a judgment about what level of departure from natural is considered impaired. Statistical techniques are available to do this (e.g. AUSRIVAS protocol). Examples of these statistics and their reporting are provided in a desktop Audit using existing data for the Ovens, Murrumbidgee and Condamine-Balonne valleys. Indicative Cost Determining the total cost of undertaking a complete Sustainable Rivers Audit according to the proposal in this report is not possible at this stage of its development. However, indicative costing for data collection, analysis and model development has been estimated for the recommended sampling intensity and reporting scales. The estimated total cost for sampling, analyses and further model development for the Audit is approximately $8.3M over five years, using the recommended sampling sizes for river-valley assessment based on sample sizes required to detect a difference of 10% (20% for water quality) with a power of 0.8 and significance level of 0.1. This sampling effort, and therefore cost, will allow reporting at the Valley Process Zone scale, but with an associated loss of confidence. The indicative cost of $8.3M represents the cost of sampling the sites required for a river valley- scale assessment. These costs were calculated based on standard commercial rates obtained from several laboratories in SE Australia. The estimated cost also includes costs associated with development of several models and analysis tools required for undertaking the project. The indicative costs do not include the costs of abstracting the hydrology data from existing models and databases. Also they do not include provision for costs associated with project management (either within the Commission or within the jurisdictions), with reporting or with the ISRAG. These costs may be significant, depending upon the efficiency of the respective groups. Pilot Audit The Sustainable Rivers Audit Taskforce (SRA Taskforce) recommended to the Commission that there be a pilot run of the Audit that reports in 2003. During the Pilot, all indicators would be developed and trialled, most likely in four river valleys across the Basin. The Pilot is a logical step in implementing the full Audit and provides the following benefits: --Data from the Pilot can be used to determine how to improve the efficiency of the indicators. For example, does everything that is being measured need to be measured? --The number of samples required and the frequency of sampling are driven by a number of factors, including the magnitude of the desired detectable change, the confidence in detecting that change, the initial condition score, the variability in the indicator and the reporting scale. While the sample size estimates presented in the report are based on best information available to the Project Team, a number of assumptions about the behaviour of the indicators have been made. Better estimates of sample size can be made once the behaviour of the indices is better known through the Pilot processes. --The Pilot will provide an opportunity to assemble and train the technicians required for undertaking the monitoring to an appropriate standard. --The Pilot will enable the analysis and reporting of the assessment to be trialled; these are monitoring elements that are often overlooked. --The Pilot will enable a more accurate assessment of the costs of a full implementation. Outlook This report presents a realistic framework for the Sustainable Rivers Audit that will provide a comprehensive annual review of the condition of the Basin’s waterways. The framework recognises that indices for environmental themes are at different stages of development and allows for staged implementation and reporting, with indicator development being undertaken during the Pilot phase and full reporting occurring thereafter. To achieve a comprehensive assessment at the Basin scale, the ISRAG will need to provide strong leadership and the Commission will need to provide substantial project management. Successful implementation of the Audit will also require considerable interjurisdictional cooperation.
Funding: MDFRC funding agency: Murray Darling Basin Commission (now Murray Darling Basin Authority)
Funding: MDFRC client: Murray Darling Basin Commission

Language: en
Rights: Open Access. This report has been reproduced with the publisher's permission.
Rights: Permission to reproduce this report must be sought from the publisher.
Type: report

RESEARCH ONLINE