urban

Using Recycled Water for Irrigation

All Australians, including farmers and urban consumers, are increasingly aware that our water is both scarce and precious. In recent years, water management has been one of the nation’s most important electoral issues. Water restrictions have limited urban users’ ability to water gardens and wash cars, while irrigators across the country have experienced often drastic cuts in water allocations, affecting food availability and prices. There are two main approaches to (more)...

Impacts of Plantation Age, Fire and Disturbance on Catchment Yield

The problem of sustainable water resource management is a key issue confronting Australia in the 21st century. Increasing demand through increased population size, declining rainfall across parts of temperate Australia and consequently an increasing need to allocate water to maintain ecosystem health and ecosystem service provision are the dominant threats to the maintenance of an adequate supply of water to urban, peri-urban and rural communities.

Investigating lake/groundwater interactions at Lake Tutchewop

Salinity is an on-going environmental concern that causes damage to agricultural land, downstream water users, aquatic ecosystems and biodiversity, as well as to regional and urban infrastructure. One strategy to manage increasing salinity in the Murray Darling Basin is the construction of 13 major salt interception schemes that divert 550,000 tonnes of salt away from the Murray River each year (Figure 1). The Barr Creek Drainage Disposal Scheme is one of these schemes diverting saline water into (more)...

Ecological Risk Management Framework for the Irrigation Industry

This document outlines an ecological risk assessment framework for the Australian irrigation industry. The objective of the framework is to provide a robust process that will assist the irrigation industry to incorporate a transparent, scientific, precautionary and ecologically sustainable approach to its management of environmental risks. The framework is catchment-based and focuses on the difficult task of assessing the risks to multiple ecological assets from multiple hazards. This (more)...

Waterwheel Newsletter 16

National Program for Sustainable Irrigation: Strategic Plan

The sustainability of irrigation is a key component of water resource management. Increased demand for water for agricultural, industrial and urban uses has put the management of Australia’s river and groundwater systems under scrutiny. Management must balance the various water use needs, providing also for in-stream requirements of biodiversity and water quality.

Establishing a standard approach

Until this project was initiated there was no generally accepted version of an Australian framework of terms and definitions for water use efficiency. As a result, people used different measures for water use efficiency e.g. one person could measure crop water use to describe water use efficiency while another could use irrigation water use. While the answers were correct as far as the particular measures are concerned, there was no way of actually comparing them because they were calculated using (more)...