Dr Shaun Thomas, Senior Scientific Officer – Water Quality at South Australia’s Environment Protection Authority said Source Catchments is an excellent decision support tool that allows environment agencies and catchment managers to describe catchment processes and test the relative impacts of management options.

“The modelling system is easy to pick up and intuitive to use and offers the operator a wide suite of water quantity and quality models to create fit-for-purpose models of varying complexity,” Dr Thomas said.

“We are using a Source Catchments model to examine a range of management and climate scenarios in the Mount Lofty Ranges watershed and will feed this into the development of a Water Quality Improvement Plan.”

Dave Waters, Senior Hydrologist from Queensland’s Department of Environment and Resource Management said that Source Catchments’ strength is its flexible design allowing the user to construct models with the level of complexity appropriate to the data available and the modelling question being posed.

“This flexibility is one of the reasons why the Queensland Government is using the Source Catchment model across the thirty-five Great Barrier Reef catchments to assess the progress towards meeting reef plan targets,” he said.

Presented at Riversymposium, the world-leading river and water management conference being held in Perth, the session also featured insights from projects involving optimising environmental water allocation in the Murray-Darling Basin, low oxygen water in the Yarra River and developing future water supply options for Canberra.

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