Program Leader

Jane Blackmore

Deputy Leader

Dr Grace Mitchell
Monash University

Goals

The outputs of this research program aim to meet the needs of the eWater products that have a water management focus, including the cluster-scale and regional-scale urban water tools.

Key Outputs

• Models that represent complex urban water cycle systems across scales. A robust representation of key system dynamics at the lot through to regional scale.
• Quantifying and accounting for uncertainty within integrated urban water management (IUWM) models, in both the overall system model and its components/modules, in association with model calibration and validation.
• Market based instruments to achieve water quality targets and promote social contracts to resolve public good water issues.
• A model, or set of metrics, to evaluate the resilience of hydrological and ecological systems;
• Demonstration software prototypes based on carefully selected case studies, illustrating the essential components of the risk method and providing a guide to its application.
• A comprehensive risk assessment framework that identifies the interactions between risk and resilience, allowing future incorporation of measures of system resilience into risk assessment.
• A suite of tools for estimating water demands from a range of consumptive and non-consumptive users (including the environment and irrigation activities) that relates economic outcomes from water management decisions.
• Better decision support tools for multi-objective water resource planning.
• A set of new approaches for modelling and optimising hydrological, ecological and water resource systems.
• A review of the water management rules that are applied in river basin models across Australia and subsequent methodologies that will allow for a wide range of water management options to be incorporated into eWater models.
• An assessment of the robustness and uncertainty associated with current water demand methodologies and subsequent recommendations for better and/or enhanced ways of modelling demands (both urban and rural) within river basin models
• Better decision support tools for multi-objective water resource planning.
• A set of new approaches for modelling and optimizing hydrological, ecological and water resource systems.