Water Allocation to the River Murray wetlands

Product Information

How much water do the wetlands of the Murray River need?

This project developed a model of the wetland plant community in 2,746 wetlands from the NSW and Victorian portions of the Murray River basin. The model used as data the average length of time out of each year each wetland was connected to the River Murray over the period 1990-2000. This value, called the connectivity, quantifies the wetting-drying cycle of a wetland. It describes the gradient between a permanent wetland which is always connected to the river, to an ephemeral wetland which only receives water every few years. Field surveys were used to describe the distribution of 36 key species of wetland plant along the gradient in connectivity. These distribution patterns were then applied to all of the wetlands in the study, one reach at a time. The resulting model was used to explore the effect of flow regulation and water extraction on the wetland plant community, and how the community might respond to changes in water supply through the River Murray.