Development of estuarine report cards consistent with the national estuarine environmental condition assessment framework

Product Information

This document has been prepared for the National Land & Water Resources Audit (the Audit) by the Water Science Branch of the Department of Water. The Audit is funding the development of a national report card system based on the emerging National Estuarine Environmental Condition Assessment Framework (NEECAF) (Mount and Arundel 2007). This report looks at the process of developing report cards with the intention of integration and translating West Australian data and information into a standard national format.

Particular focus has been placed on the South Coast Region and the South West Region. The estuaries selected experience a wide range of conditions including varied estuary bar characteristics, rainfall and river flow and anthropogenic pressures. They include the Hardy Inlet, Broke Inlet, Wilson Inlet, Beaufort Inlet, Wellstead Estuary, Hamersley Inlet and Stokes Inlet. The upper Swan estuary is used in one example to highlight pressure and vulnerability examples.

This report includes some discussion of the back end process of gathering information on the estuaries, producing condition statements, inventory report cards and using this information to identify conditions of concern and information gaps in the understanding of the ecological processes operating in the estuary. The second part of this report focuses on an assessment of pressure, vulnerability and risk. A summary table is also included of the management objectives, pressures, vulnerabilities and indicators of condition and for targets for specific estuaries.