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Flow-MER Fridays: Series 2

Webinar 5: Why modelling matters

Presenters: Dr Danial Stratford (CSIRO), Dr Ashley MacQueen (Deakin University) and Bruce Campbell (CEWO)

The Commonwealth Environmental Water Office (CEWO) manages a portfolio of environmental water distributed across approximately 20,000 km of streams and rivers, as well as floodplains and wetlands, and benefiting over 200 native species. The CEWO currently monitor and track the environmental outcomes of this water across seven Selected Areas to inform and report on the outcomes and benefits of environmental water delivery. A monitoring program such Flow-MER provides many benefits, but alone it has limitations in understanding outcomes in unmonitored locations, or at basin scales.  It is also hard to quantify the relative contribution provided by environmental water in achieving the observed outcomes.

Modelling complements and builds upon monitoring by providing a means to understand outcomes in locations beyond the monitored areas, as well as the relative benefit provided by environmental water compared to what would have occurred without Commonwealth environmental water (i.e. the ‘counterfactual’). This webinar shares an overview of the modelling work being undertaken by the CSIRO and Deakin University team to develop methods to understand how improvements in hydrology translate into improvements in ecology.  Danial and Ashley discuss the tools and frameworks being developed to support extrapolation to unmonitored areas and the understanding of watering outcomes at basin-scales.  Bruce provides a CEWO perspective on how this modelling work will assist in their on-ground environmental water delivery.

Presenters

Dr Danial Stratford

Dr Danial Stratford

Danial is an aquatic ecologist and ecological modeller with CSIRO Land and Water in the Modelling Water Ecosystems team with a background in modelling the environmental outcomes resulting from changes in flow regimes. He has a broad range of experience from within the Murray-Darling Basin, northern Australia and internationally, and has delivered to a range of stakeholders and clients. Danial uses a range of approaches and draws upon skills in statistical analysis, statistical modelling and mechanistic modelling to understand, quantify and predict the environmental outcomes of flow events, flow sequences and flow regimes. He specialises in understanding temporal dynamics and scenario analysis, linking hydrological data to quantify environmental outcomes under uncertainty. The core of Danial’s work is to deliver products and knowledge to improve the environmental outcomes associated with water management at a range of spatial and temporal scales.
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Dr Ashley Macqueen

Dr Ashley Macqueen

Ashley is an aquatic ecologist and a postdoctoral research fellow at Deakin University. His work focusses on drawing together diverse datasets and models in novel ways to create tools that are underpinned by core ecological principles and inform the management of aquatic systems in Australia and abroad.

Bruce Campbell

Bruce Campbell

Bruce Campbell is a Water Resources and Environmental Engineer with over 30 years’ experience in environmental flows, river operations, groundwater hydrology and salinity management in the MDB. Bruce has found that models benefit greatly when combined with experience. When involved in the testing and operation of hydrological models, Bruce and his modeller colleagues identified and corrected many errors- with the models better for it. Bruce has learned to distrust any model output when results do not follow intuition until the reason(s) are identified and understood- contributing to experience in a feedback loop. He subscribes to the common adage “All models are wrong. Some are useful” but would also say “Some are very useful“.
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Feature image: Ashley and Galen doing some ‘modelling’. Photo: Rebecca Lester

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