28 September 2018

River flows in northern Australia support healthy ecosystems that provide a wealth of economic, social and cultural goods and services such as fisheries, recreation and tourism attractions, bush tucker, clean water, fertile floodplains and more. Current Northern Hub environmental flow research is focusing on WA’s Fitzroy River, NT’s Daly River and rivers in Qld’s southern Gulf of Carpentaria, but we need to be able to confidently apply the flow–ecology knowledge from these rivers to less well-studied systems. A new Hub project led by Associate Professor Mark Kennard of Griffith University is doing just that, by synthesising research findings from these systems to see how transferable they are to other locations and scales across the north. This work will improve transparency about the inferential strength and transferability of flow–ecology links to inform water planning and management and help us better understand the river flow-related impacts of development proposals and climate change in catchments with limited field data. For more information visit the project webpage or see the start-up factsheet.

Ecosystems respond to changes in flow, photo Michael Douglas.