Our Flow-MER Fridays line-up this Autumn included:
- Condition, resilience and non-woody vegetation – Cherie Campbell
- Social and environmental challenges of scale in monitoring and evaluation – Prof Ross Thompson
- Oh, what a tangled web we weave: understanding the role of flows for food webs – Dr Paul McInerney and James Hitchcock
All session recordings can be found below. Please enjoy and subscribe to Flow-MER updates for the next series.
Session 1 – 3rd March 2023
Condition, resilience and non-woody vegetation
As a vegetation ecologist, Cherie is interested in the maintenance and recovery of wetland and floodplain vegetation in river-floodplain ecosystems. Her PhD research with the University of Canberra, under the supervision of Fiona Dyer, Ross Thompson and Sam Capon, aims to rethink the way condition is used to envisage and evaluate non-woody vegetation responses to environmental flows.
Session 2 – 10th March 2023
Social and environmental challenges of scale in monitoring and evaluation
Large scale environmental monitoring and evaluation programs are increasingly common globally. As the scale of management and restoration increases a range of issues arise including cross-jurisdictional management, determining and enacting engagement at different scales and extrapolating outcomes. In large European rivers these have been approached in a range of ways, and the highlights of those programs will be extracted and compared to the approach taken in the Murray Darling Basin.
Session 3 – 17th March 2023
Oh, what a tangled web we weave: understanding the role of flows for Food webs
Understanding energy flow through ecosystems is critical for understanding patterns of biodiversity and ecosystem function. Alteration of riverine flows can modify the structure and function of ecosystems, changing the availability and quality of food for animals. Research carried out within the Environmental Water Knowledge and Research (EWKR) and Flow MER food web themes has sought to improve our understanding of the complex relationship between hydrology and aquatic Food webs. In this session Paul will highlight some of the research that has arisen from the EWKR and other MDB projects that set the scene for research in Flow MER. James will provide an overview of a Basin-scale food web simulator that integrates knowledge of Basin Food webs with long-term monitoring data to provide estimates of the contribution that environmental water is making to the Biomass of key taxa groups. We will touch on recent research that helps us understand what is happening in the food web during large floods and directions for future work.