Framework for the Assessment of River and Wetland Health
The National Water Commission has developed a national framework that can form the basis of national river and wetland health assessments, and has the capacity to bring together results of existing broad-scale assessments conducted at state, territory and basin scales.
Understanding the environmental condition of Australia's aquatic ecosystems is central to their management. The Framework for the Assessment of River and Wetland Health (FARWH) was developed when scoping undertaken for the Australian Water Resources 2005 baseline assessment identified difficulties in reporting on river and wetland health in a comparable manner within and across jurisdictions, and deficiencies in the level of information available for current NWI reporting requirements.
FARWH aims
The FARWH aims to:
- develop an approach that can be used by the Australian Government and all states and territories to provide nationally comparable assessments of river and wetland health
- incorporate a critical suite of river and wetland attributes that indicate key ecological processes and are conceptually appropriate for comprehensive assessments of river and wetland health
- interpret and prioritise the causes of observed environmental degradation using the measured attributes.
How it will be used
The FARWH does not generate data itself or replace existing monitoring and assessment programs. Rather, it provides a methodology to integrate and aggregate the data collected by the states and territories to be reported at a water management area scale. This provides an important link between aquatic ecosystem health and water management planning.
It has also been designed to ensure that the outputs from previously conducted and future monitoring and assessment activities in the states and territories are nationally comparable.
Components
The FARWH uses a conceptual model of river and wetland function, based on six ecologically significant components that should be represented in all future river and wetland health assessments. These key ecological components are:
- catchment disturbance
- hydrological change
- water quality and soils
- physical form
- fringing zone
- aquatic biota.
Testing the FARWH
The FARWH has been successfully tested on Victorian and Tasmanian monitoring and assessment programs, and trials are now underway in Queensland across four different ecosystem types. Further trials will be undertaken in Western Australia, the wetlands of Central New South Wales and across the wet/dry tropics of Northern Australia.