Why we did it

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.

What we delivered

Eco Risk Projector is based on a modularised modelling framework that allows the creation of environmental asset models. There are over 30 (and growing) ecological models in Eco Risk Projector. This model plug-in framework is delivered through a web interface that manages data sources for different water use scenarios and location specific model calibration implementations. Eco Risk Projector assesses model performance (usually habitat suitability) at many sites, and integrates these spatial results through time to provide a spatio-temporal risk assessment for water management scenario assessment.