Rivers and floodplains interactions

Full Title

Flow regieme, water quality and biological interactions between rivers and floodplains

Contact Person 

Daryl Nielsen

Project Team

Project Leader: Angela Arthington (Griffith University)

Funding Body

eWater CRC

Duration

January 2006 to January 2012

Outcomes 

Translate the ecological concepts, principles and relationships found from the above areas of research into explicit, quantitative relationships and predictive models that will be useful to River Operations and other eWater packages, and to water managers.

Summary

This project aims to advance scientific understanding and management of Australian rivers and their floodplains by assessing how variability in riverine flow across a continuum of wet-summer and wet-winter catchments generates and affects:

1. Habitats and water quality within riverine systems.
2. The flow-related ecology of important aquatic and riparian plants, invertebrates and fish species inhabiting rivers and floodplains.

Products will include flow guidelines for species and functional groups, and predictive or prognostic flow-ecological models that will be useful for assessing management interventions.

Aims:

1. charaterise the features of the low regime that are important to ecosystems (e.g. magnitude, timing, frequency, duration, rate of change)
2. identify relationships between flow variability on
   a.  habitats
   b.  water quality
   c.  selected taxa (e.g. iconic, keystone and endangered taxa, and species with wide distribution across a spatial continuum)
   d.  functional groups (e.g. riparian, wetland and floodplain vegetation, invertebrate guilds), and
   e.  assemblages (e.g. fish) in river-floodplain systems.
3. compare the influences of particular flow quantities and sequences (e.g. dry spells, low flows, intermittent floods) on ecosystem processes