The challenge
When conducting water resource planning and assessment, alternative water use scenarios are created using hydrological models. The planning process may require the relative differences in the likely ecological outcomes of alternative water use scenarios to be quantified. There is a need to determine the risk to environmental assets (e.g. particular species, habitats or processes) posed by the various water use scenarios or observed conditions. An example may be to determine if a water use scenario provides sufficient water to create suitable habitat conditions for a species of fish to breed or migrate.
There is also a need to conduct assessments across multiple locations to assess the collective risks to aquatic ecology across a whole catchment, by considering multiple locations in space through time to identify times of temporally concurrent high ecological risk.