Ecosystem Response Modelling in the Murray-Darling Basin

2010 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Water ◽  
Ecological Condition ◽  
Environmental Restoration ◽  
Ecosystem Response ◽  
Government Programs ◽  
High Profile ◽  
Murray Darling Basin ◽  
The Status ◽  
Wetland Recovery ◽  
Response Modelling

Ecosystem Response Modelling in the Murray-Darling Basin provides an overview of the status of science in support of water management in Australia’s largest and most economically important river catchment, and brings together the leading ecologists working in the rivers and wetlands of the Basin. It introduces the issues in ecosystem response modelling and how this area of science can support environmental watering decisions. The declining ecological condition of the internationally significant wetlands of the Murray-Darling Basin has been a prominent issue in Australia for many years. Several high profile government programs have sought to restore the flow conditions required to sustain healthy wetlands, and this book documents the scientific effort that is underpinning this task. In the Southern Murray-Darling Basin, the River Murray, the Murrumbidgee River and their associated wetlands and floodplains have been the focus of the Murray-Darling Basin Authority’s ‘The Living Murray’ program, and the NSW Rivers Environmental Restoration Program. The book documents research aimed at informing environmental water use in a number of iconic wetlands including those along the Murray – the Barmah-Millewa Forest; the Chowilla Floodplain and Lindsay-Wallpolla Islands; the Coorong and Murray mouth; and the Murrumbidgee – the Lowbidgee Floodplain. Within the Northern Murray-Darling Basin, research conducted in support of the Wetland Recovery Plan and the NSW Rivers Environmental Restoration Program has improved our knowledge of the Gwydir Wetlands and the Macquarie Marshes, and the water regimes required to sustain their ecology.

Water policy responses to drought in the MDB, Australia

Water Policy ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 18 (S2) ◽  
pp. 28-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Horne
Keyword(s):  
Water Policy ◽  
Resource Planning ◽  
Environmental Water ◽  
Short Term ◽  
National Budget ◽  
Policy Responses ◽  
Murray Darling Basin ◽  
Millennium Drought ◽  
Basin Water ◽  
Market Infrastructure

This paper reviews water policy responses to drought in Australia, focusing on the Murray-Darling Basin (MDB) during the two decades from 1997. This period, which includes the decade long Millennium drought, brought a much sharper focus to discussions of scarcity and value of water. The drought initially focused attention on rising salinity and environmental water availability, as action on both was supported by strong science, and resonated politically. The drought became a crisis in 2006. Short-term planning focused on ensuring communities did not run out of water. For the longer term, the national government responded by announcing a major package of reform measures addressing sustainability and underlying scarcity, and recognising climate change. The package strengthened MDB water market infrastructure, upgraded water resource planning and the ability of irrigators to manage their water assets more flexibly, established new sustainable diversion limits and provided funding to ensure the environment received a larger share of basin water resources. But its completeness as a package can be attributed not only to the severity of drought, but also to political leadership, a disrupting strategy in the form of national legislation and a strong national budget that provided financial resources. The drought provided a crisis, but other ingredients were necessary to ensure effective action.

Conservation of an inauspicious endangered freshwater fish, Murray hardyhead (Craterocephalus fluviatilis), during drought and competing water demands in the Murray–Darling Basin, Australia

2013 ◽  
Vol 64 (9) ◽  
pp. 792 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iain M. Ellis ◽  
Daniel Stoessel ◽  
Michael P. Hammer ◽  
Scotte D. Wedderburn ◽  
Lara Suitor ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Freshwater Fish ◽  
Environmental Water ◽  
River Regulation ◽  
Isolated Populations ◽  
Conservation Units ◽  
European Settlement ◽  
Water Demands ◽  
Murray Darling Basin ◽  
Conservation Concern ◽  
Australian Freshwater

Approximately 40% of Australian freshwater fish species are of conservation concern, largely because of the impacts of river regulation, habitat fragmentation and alien fishes. Murray hardyhead is a threatened fish endemic to the southern Murray–Darling Basin in Australia, which has declined significantly in range and abundance since European settlement. Conservation of the species has relied largely on environmental watering of off-channel wetlands where isolated populations persist. This became problematic during recent drought (1997–2010) because of competing demands for limited water, and resentment towards environmental watering programs from communities that themselves were subject to reduced water entitlements. In response, emergency conservation measures prioritised the delivery of environmental water to minimise applied volumes. Captive maintenance programs were established for fish rescued from four genetically distinct conservation units, with varying levels of breeding success. Several translocations of wild and captive-bred fish to surrogate refuge sites were also conducted. Future recovery of the species should secure existing natural and stocked populations and translocate fish to additional appropriate sites to spread risk and reinstate natural pathways for dispersal. The approach to the conservation of Murray hardyhead during extreme environmental conditions provides insights to inform the management of fishes in other drought-prone regions of the world.

Virtual Faith

2006 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 271-276 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Kubiak
Keyword(s):  
Hip Hop ◽  
Current Theory ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Religion And Spirituality ◽  
Dance Culture ◽  
High Profile ◽  
The Status ◽  
American Schools ◽  
Rave Culture ◽  
The Impact

The recent rubs and resistances within the various flows of religious thought and practice in American culture and politics have become near clichés. The impact of right-wing religions on government and cultural policies has been well noted, as have the concomitant attempts to keep religion of all kinds out of politics entirely. Meanwhile, the problematic status of Islam both locally and globally has become a continuous topic of debate, as have the debates over creationism and so-called intelligent design in American schools. These high-profile debates have in turn eclipsed the suspicions of academic leftist thought regarding religious questions of any sort, and this has in turn resulted in an entrenchment of theory—especially political theory—into a kind of religiosity of its own, while various forms of revivalism have signaled the mutation of faith into dogma, most recently the dogma of moderation. Each of these issues, apart from its intrinsic importance and currency, speaks to the practice of religion as a fundamentally philosophical problem of appearances that continues to emerge as a first cause of politics and of culture. The status of religion as a uniquely performative issue will, I think, occupy theorists over the coming years. Indeed, I suggest here that the thinking through of religion and spirituality will necessarily take place along the ontologic fault lines not just of performance but of theatre itself, and will come to delineate the important differences between performance and theatre. Finally, the reappraisal of religion as an ontologically charged theatricality will move into areas far afield from normative spirituality: cyberreligions and technoshamanism, chaos magic and the new alchemies, rave culture and other varieties of hyperinduced trance states.1 Although the focus in these newer forms of performance is almost exclusively on music, sound, and movement, the ultimate goal is the created intensity of a shared performative experience framed by theatrical perception: Artaud is the genius cited by nearly all of the authors of these phenomena. One larger suggestion here, in fact, is the moribund state of current theory, which sees dance culture (techno, hip-hop, electronica, rave), when it sees it at all, almost exclusively in cultural and political terms, ignoring the ecstatic, trance, and transformative aspects of DJ culture at large.2

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