A national synthesis of river restoration projects
Waterlines report 23 - November 2009
There is no national, centralised, coordinating reference point for Australian river restoration projects. Records are completed in a variety of ways - often unique to the organisation or individual conducting the project.
Several thousand river restoration projects are under way across Australia each year. Annual expenditure is more than $100 million, funded through a range of government programs, non-government organisations, industry groups, and individual public and private landholders.
Easily accessible systems that share river restoration project information and experiences would allow people to learn from the success or failure of projects and to monitor and evaluate results.
This report recommends the collection and synthesising of information on Australian river restoration efforts to inform adaptive management. It says a national database would be useful to a wide range of audiences, from governments and policy makers who are interested in the scale and range of costs of river restoration, through to catchment management agencies wanting to track where works have been undertaken in their region.
The database would also be able to highlight the crucial ingredients for successful river restoration projects, and how best to go about ensuring that new projects built on this experience rather than reinventing approaches already tried.
The database would act as a hub of information for government, river managers, communities and others interested in learning about and sharing river restoration experiences.
The report details points of consideration for such a database and cites an example of the successful National River Restoration Scientific Synthesis in the United States.
Documents for download
Fact sheet - national synthesis of river restoration projects (213KB)