Program Leader

Dr Bill Young
CSIRO Land and Water

Deputy Leader

TBC

Goals

The program will investigate runoff and material generation processes, hydrologic regimes including interactions between surface water and groundwater, transport and transformations of energy and materials through catchments, and how all of these affect the aquatic ecosystems of rivers, floodplains and estuaries. eWater products including the Restoration Planning and Prioritisation Tool, the Ecological Modelling Platform, the River Operations and Management tools, WaterCAST, and the monitoring design guidelines from the Integrated Monitoring and Assessment system, all depend on research outputs from this program.

Key outputs

• Improved datasets of historic actual and potential evapo-transpiration and vegetation cover.
• Catchment models coupled to remotely sensed and ground-based datasets.
• Model-data assimilation framework for water yield forecasts and river operations.
• Validated catchment models of material generation and delivery.
• Validated models of surface-groundwater exchanges of water and salt for lowland rivers.
• Validated models of primary and secondary in stream production as a function of carbon and nitrogen loads.
• Generic system-scale biophysical framework for integrating data and knowledge of river-floodplain-estuary processes.
• Coherent river, floodplain and estuary health indicators and protocols for indicator use in environmental flow management.
• Models of aquatic ecosystem responses to flow and material fluxes, encompassing habitat structure, flow-life history processes, trophic interactions and river-floodplain-estuary linkages.