 |
||
|
Soil and Landscape Science
Surface Water Hydrology
Groundwater Hydrology
Environmental Information Systems
Environmental Earth Observation
Catchment Biogeochemistry and Aquatic Ecology
Contaminant Chemistry and Ecotoxicology
Water Reuse and Environmental Process Engineering
Urban Water Systems Engineering
|
 Canberra Laboratory - Public Seminar Series Abstracts 2007Thursday 15 February 2007 at 11am The System-Wide (SWWRP) program is designed to assemble and integrate geospatial, hydrological and hydrodynamic, and ecological tools and models in one of four frameworks (1-D, multi-D, GIS, or Web-based) for a tiered approach to water resources management. Tools of various levels of fidelity (e.g., screening, planning, intermediate, and complex multi-dimensional codes) are delivered with common data input and output techniques for efficient application. Users have access to a variety of "connected" (either loosely or tightly coupled) watershed, riverine, reservoir, estuarine, and coastal models for a systems approach to assess physical and biological response to water resource management and ecosystem restoration activities. The program is in its third year of development. An overview of the program and tools (with progress to date), will be presented. Friday 16 February 2007 at 11am The Upper Mississippi River (UMR) boasts both a nationally valuable
navigation system and globally significant ecosystem supporting
diverse communities of plants and animals. It encompasses an area
extending from the Great Lakes to near St Louis, Missouri. It
includes 37 locks and approximately 2,000 kilometres of navigable
waterway within portions of Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, and
Wisconsin. The UMR ecosystem also consists of hundreds of thousands
of hectares of bottomland forest, islands, backwaters, side
channels, and wetlands.. More than 40 percent of North America’s
migratory waterfowl and shorebirds depend on the food resources and
other life requisites that the system provides. The system’s ancient
fish and freshwater mussels are a unique and significant fauna. It
also provides boating, camping, hunting, trapping, and other
recreational opportunities to more than 11 million visitors each
year. In comparison the River Murray (also ~2,000 km) has a similar
history of management and similar environmental issues. Thursday 22 February 2007 at 11am Tuesday 6 March 2007 at 1pm CSIRO is moving rapidly through an organisational redesign that will better focus our capabilities on challenges of national significance. It is vital that staff understand these changes and their opportunities to help make them a success. A presentation aimed at increasing the understanding of these changes from the perspectives of Water for a Healthy Country Research Flagship and CSIRO Land and Water will cover the following topics:
The presentation will be followed by open discussion. Wednesday 7 March 2007 at 11am Increased catchment sediment yields are common following the introduction of European-style agriculture to relatively undisturbed landscapes. Catchment erosion rates generally increase immediately after disturbance and then decline over time. Consequently, where a catchment currently sits along this disturbance-recovery sequence will strongly influence future catchment sediment yields and river morphology. In this study, field stratigraphy, optical dating, and hydraulic modelling are used to investigate changes in catchment sediment yield and storage in the Lake Burragorang catchment in Australia with emphasis placed upon changes occurring since European settlement in 1820. On the Southern Tablelands and the upper Cox's River subcatchment, a large volume of sediment was liberated by gully erosion early in the post-settlement period, much of which was deposited at break of slope positions below the catchment's headwaters or stored in alluvial benches adjacent to the channel but within the confines of older Holocene alluvium. A lack of substantial sediment deposition over the last 20 to 40 years is evidence that catchment sediment yields have strongly declined. This is consistent with both reduced erosion rates and re-aggradation of the incised gullies that, in their erosive phase, dominated the catchment's post-settlement sediment flux. Collectively, these characteristics indicate the catchment is undergoing a phase of landscape recovery. The implications of these changes in sediment yield and storage for modelling of catchment sediment budgets will also be examined. Wednesday 28 March 2007 at 11am Abstract: The Ord is a tropical river in north Western Australia, regulated by two dams, and has a turbid, macrotidal estuary. Plans to further develop the catchment area, including doubling the area of irrigated land, will lead to changes in flows and sediment and nutrient loads to the system. A project currently underway aims to improve our understanding of the system function and predict how it might change in response to changes in flows and sediment loads. Results so far highlight the importance of sediments and terrestrial inputs to the system, and suggest that production in the relatively clear, freshwater section of the river is limited by phosphorus availability, while a zone of higher chlorophyll concentrations in the turbid mid-estuary region may be attributable to physical transport processes rather than local production. A biogeochemical model of the system is being developed and will be applied to a series of change scenarios Wednesday 4 April 2007 at 11am Six Significant Ecological Assets (SEAs) have been identified across the Murray-Darling Basin as part of the Living Murray Initiative. The area encompassing the Lower Lakes, Coorong and Murray Mouth was selected as one of these Assets because of its unique ecological qualities, its hydrological significance and its social, cultural and economic values. The Coorong, a major element of the Asset, is a 120-km long coastal lagoon that runs along the South Australian coast and joins the Murray Mouth near its northern end. Until recently, seasonal flows down the River Murray have been sufficient to clear the Murray Mouth and maintain a connection between the Coorong and the sea. Drought conditions in the Murray-Darling Basin coupled with extensive irrigation abstraction have resulted in Mouth closure leading to altered water level and salinity regimes within the Coorong with attendant ecological impacts. In this talk, I will focus on the physical dynamics of the Coorong and particularly on the interplay between Mouth opening, mixing exchange, salinity regime and water levels along the lagoon. This analysis demonstrates that the nature of these interactions is not necessarily what one might initially think they might be, but it does provide an opportunity to assess the likely effectiveness of physical manipulation of the system to achieve ecologically desirable water level and salinity regimes. Wednesday 23 May 2007 at 11am ABSTRACT: In coastal regions, hydrodynamic and biogeochemical models model-data assimilation requires high temporal resolution satellite data sets due to short time and space scales of coastal ocean processes. Assimilation of ocean colour satellite observation into coastal ocean biogeochemical models is still in an early stage of development; this is partly due to the lack of valid and quantitative (in terms of error analysis) coastal ocean colour products. Coastal waters over the estuary-coast-ocean continuum show a high spatial and temporal variability in optical properties i.e. how they absorb and scatter light as a function of biogeochemical constituents’ concentrations. We present the first results of the assimilation of ocean colour datasets into coastal ocean biogeochemical models for the tropical East Australian Fitzroy Estuary and Keppel Bay system (FE-KB) close to the Great Barrier Reef lagoon. As part of the Great Barrier Reef Monitoring Program, a regional algorithm for operational delivery of valid coastal ocean colour products was recently developed for the Fitzroy River Estuary and Keppel Bay system. A new generation of regional specific algorithm for the FE-KB system had to be developed for large satellite datasets of the MODIS sensors as the global algorithms failed. These new regional algorithms are generic in structure and therefore easily adaptable to SeaWiFs and MERIS. Concurrently, a biogeochemical model was developed for the system, built upon a three-dimensional hydrodynamic and sediment dynamic model, and simulating nitrogen and phosphorus dynamics including the dynamics of dissolved organic material as well as pelagic and benthic primary production. One of the aims was to provide estimates of material fluxes from Keppel Bay to the Great Barrier Reef Lagoon. The biogechemical model was run first with fixed boundary conditions based on the limited in situ measurements, then with boundary conditions derived from satellite datasets using the region-specific algorithm. Several methodologies for matching of remote sensing observations to model variables were evaluated over a period of one year (2004). The biogeochemical model and MODIS satellite imagery derived maps of total suspended matter and chlorophyll were compared. When remote sensing information was used to inform the boundaries, estimates of material fluxes in the model changed substantially in magnitude and direction. Thursday 24 May 2007 at 11am at CSIRO Discovery
Centre Lecture Theatre Abstract: The Baltimore Ecosystem Study (BES) is one of 26 National Science Foundation funded Long Term Ecological Research sites in the United States, of which two are in urban areas. This talk presents information synthesized from measurement and modeling of coupled hydrologic and biogeochemical cycles in forested and suburban catchments of the BES. A major initiative has been undertaken by the City and County of Baltimore to significantly reduce nitrogen exports into the Chesapeake Bay, as part of a large scale effort to improve the health and reduce advancing eutrophication. Suburban sprawl has transformed large areas of agricultural land into mixed residential, commercial, residual or regrowth forest, and some remaining farms. A conceptual model of mixed land use ecosystems is developed based on hydrologic controls of nitrogen transformations and transport under altered land cover and flowpaths in ’natural’ and ‘built’ environments. The altered geomorphic structure and built drainage systems of the watershed produce significant modification of catchment scale soil moisture, carbon cycling and nutrient retention. The conceptual model is operationalized in a distributed landscape ecological model of integrated water, carbon and nutrient cycling. The model is first calibrated in a forest control catchment to produce distributed soil moisture, runoff and streamwater nitrate concentrations. The parameters are then transferred to a nearby catchment that is very similar in topography and soils, but developed in low density suburban landcover. No additional calibration is carried out and the effects of land cover change and direct human activities are incorporated through altered canopy and surface cover conditions (including impervious surface and storm sewers), sampled parcel scale lawn fertilization and irrigation, as well as septic system wastewater input. Numerical experiments with the simulation model and field sampling are used to explore coupling and nonlinear response of water and nutrient cycling and export within each catchment. Opposite trends in nutrient streamwater concentrations are seen in response a major drought in our forest and low density suburban catchments, that appears to be explained by spatial location of nutrient sources and the interaction between hillslope and riparian flowpaths. Policy implications for the design and retrofit of developed catchments to optimize water and nutrient retention are discussed. Wednesday 13 June 2007 at 11am Abstract: The off-site transfer of burnt soil material in wildfire-affected catchments has important implications for downstream water quality. In the context of recent attention to particle agglomeration in freshwater systems (e.g. sediment flocs and water-stable aggregates), this work considers the impact of wildfire on the effective particle size of burnt soil to assess its influence on post-fire fine sediment and nutrient transport dynamics. Samples of burnt and unburnt soil material were analysed for effective particle size, settling velocity, composite particle density, and porosity using established microscope-based image analysis approaches and a laser-diffraction approach. In line with other studies, burnt soil material exhibits a coarser particle size distribution than unburnt material implying aggregation of fines into coarser composite particles. Burnt soil aggregates exhibit significantly higher settling velocities (mean 11.47 ± 1.11 mm s-1) than unburnt aggregates of similar diameter (3.36 ± 0.91 mm s-1) reflecting an increase in density because of reduction in organic content and a reduction in pore space linked to shrinkage. Laboratory burning experiments indicate that these dense water-stable aggregates are formed at relatively low temperatures (250 °C) probably due to distillation and carbonisation of organic volatiles in surface litter which assist in aggregate binding. Consequently the effective particle size distribution of burnt surface soil coarsens with up to 50% of the <63 µm fraction becoming aggregated. Given that a large proportion of soil particulate phosphorus is associated with the <63 µm fraction, fire-related aggregation processes have interesting implications for post-fire fine sediment and nutrient budgets. Wednesday 27 June 2007 at 11am Abstract: Monitoring the fractional cover of photosynthetic vegetation (PV), non-photosynthetic vegetation (NPV) and bare soil (BS) is important for grazing management, fire risk assessment and erosion control. We developed a simple method for resolving their fractional cover with hyperspectral imagery, by combining the Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) which measures vegetation greenness and the Cellulose Absorption Index (CAI), which quantifies the intensity of the cellulose-lignin feature at 2.0-2.2 um, and then applying a linear unmixing. We applied this method to three EO-1 Hyperion scenes acquired during the 2005 growing season in a site in northern Australia. Data from field measurements and from fire scar maps provided a means for qualitatively validating the results obtained. We then explored the potential of the MODIS sensor for resolving vegetation fractional cover. We generated synthetic MODIS data from the Hyperion images and also used actual MODIS reflectance from the MOD09 product, concurrent with the Hyperion images. We found that the MODIS sensor, despite not being able to quantify the cellulose feature directly, can be used for mapping fractional cover. This is due to the fact that vegetation, regardless of its photosynthetic status, has a lower reflectance at 2.1 um (MODIS band 7) than at 1.6 um (MODIS band 6), compared to soils, which have a relatively flat spectra at those wavelengths. We propose using the ratio of band 7 to band 6 together with the NDVI for resolving the proportions of PV, NPV and BS. We show a prototype of an operational product based on the MOD43 product and discuss its strengths and limitations. Wednesday 8 August 2007 at 11am Abstract: Agriculture is the second biggest contributor of greenhouse gases in Australia, with the National Greenhouse Gas Inventory estimating that emissions from this source constitute 16.5% of all the country's emissions. This compares with 50% from stationary energy (powerhouse) sources, and only 13% from the next highest sector, transport. The main emission from the energy and transport sectors is carbon dioxide. The main greenhouse emissions from agriculture in Australia are methane from ruminants and nitrous oxide from soilsand fertilizers. These gases have high global warming potentials: methane is 21 times and nitrous oxide is 310 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. Recognising the need to derive our own emission factors, the Australian Greenhouse Office has inaugurated a 4-year Strategic R&D Investment Plan of targeted research on managing greenhouse gas emissions and responding to climate change in agriculture and natural resource management. The seminar will address the AGO-funded projects in which the speaker is involved, including research addressing greenhouse gas emissions in intensive animal production systems; greenhouse gas fluxes from sugarcane soils; and quantification of indirect greenhouse gases from agriculture. Friday 31 August 2007 at 11am Abstract: Gnangara Mound is Australia's most significant local groundwater resource. Covering an area of about 2000 km2 in total, about half is covered by native bushland, and about 200km2 by pine plantations, mainly Pinus pinaster. The water storage in the upper part of the mound is declining by about 50GL per year and there has been much debate around the relative contributions from declining rainfall, reduced recharge under the pines and native bush, and private and public groundwater extraction. In this seminar I will present the results of a study aimed at quantifying the water balance of the pine plantations and at determining whether they access groundwater. We measured the water use of five stands of pine trees at different ages, planting densities and depths to groundwater over an eighteen month period from mid-2004. We found that even under relatively low stem density there was no recharge, that the trees could abstract water from significant depths, and that there was no evidence of recent recharge under any of the pine stands studied. The results raise several implications for management of the plantations into the future. Funding for the study came from the Water Corporation and CSIRO through the Water for a Healthy Country Flagship. Dr Richard Silberstein is a Principal Research Scientist, CSIRO Land and Water, Floreat, WA. He is a catchment hydrologist who specialises in vegetation-water-salt interactions, and the role of vegetation and land use in catchment and aquifer water and salt balances. Friday 21 September 2007 at 11am Abstract: Western Australia has the largest area of dryland salinity in the nation and the highest risk of increased salinity in the next 50 years, with the annual cost of its consequences estimated to be up to $664 million. About 25–30% of the Avon basin, the largest of all in the wheatbelt, may develop shallow water tables and will be at risk of salinisation at the reach of new equilibrium. Increasing concern about the impacts of salinity and waterlogging, combined with an understanding that the current level of catchment revegetation is inadequate for salinity control, is driving many landowners to consider engineering options, especially drainage systems, for lowering water tables and salinity in agricultural catchments of the Avon Basin and wheatbelt. In the first study of its kind in the wheatbelt of WA, we evaluated options for planning, design and construction of drainage systems and disposal and management of drainage discharge, and assessed the hydrological and economic implications of various subcatchment and regional scale drainage management strategies for the Avon basin. Monday 24 September at 11am Abstract: We have implemented
a prototype operational system to determine the state and trend
of the terrestrial water balance of the Australian continent.
The system determines soil moisture in two layers and all water
fluxes contributing to changes in soil moisture (rainfall,
transpiration, soil evaporation, surface runoff and deep
drainage), across the entire Australian continent at a spatial
resolution of 5 km. Information is provided in three forms: (1)
weekly near-real-time reporting, (2) historical monthly time
series (1900 to present), and (3) monthly climatologies. The model-data fusion approach combines information from both the assimilated data and the dynamic model to maximise knowledge about the system. Both sequential data assimilation (Ensemble Kalman Filter) and parameter estimation (batch-mode Levenberg-Marquardt) methods are used. This talk will describe (1) the model, (2) the meteorological data, (3) the assimilation data, (4) the model-data fusion approaches, and (5) the prototype operational system. Results will be presented on recent trends in soil moisture and water fluxes, particularly evapotranspiration and discharge, demonstrating that in most parts of southeast Australia the water balance has operated far outside the statistical envelope of the preceding half century. These results are supported by observed trends in vegetation greenness. Figure: Annual-mean anomaly in deep soil moisture (0.2 to 1 m) for 2006, as percentile rank. Red areas are 30th percentile and lower, blue areas are 70th percentile and higher.
.
Friday 28 September 2007 at 11am Abstract: Information describing the movement of sediment from its sources in the river catchments, to the river estuaries and eventually off-shore often relies on catchment-based erosion models and off-shore hydrodynamic transport models to predict the source, transport pathway and eventual fate of sediment particles. In many cases there are no direct means of verifying the model outputs. Environmental tracers can provide unique and valuable information on the rates and pathways of water sediment transport and deposition. These tracers, many of which are radioactive and occur naturally, offer a way of verifying and improving model outputs. In this seminar examples are presented showing applications of tracer measurements in three regions: the catchment of the Gippsland Lakes, the Western Port embayment, and the central Great Barrier Reef lagoon. In Gippsland tracers were able to improve on modelled estimates of sediment erosion, including topsoil delivery from forest and pasture, and tunnel erosion in the foothills north and east of Bairnsdale, while a sediment core from Lake Wellington was able to constrain the sediment budget for West Gippsland. In Western Port fallout tracers and sediment–cores identified the likely sediment-related causes of seagrass loss. In the GBR region, radium isotopes have provided estimates of off-shore mixing between the inner and outer GBR lagoon, and Coral Sea water. Wednesday 3 October 2007 at 11am Abstract: The ways in which science is governed are changing. There have been radical departures from previous models, affecting not only the way scientific projects are carried out but also entire professional careers. In conceptual terms, this change has been described as a move from academic, investigator-initiated and discipline-based knowledge production to context-driven, problem-focused and interdisciplinary knowledge production. In South Africa, these changes in the science arena were accentuated during the late 1980s by international isolation, a defence priority and shrinking research budgets. CSIR South Africa adopted a double-income business model in 1987 and set out on a commercialisation journey. However, by 2005 it was clear that the pendulum had swung too far and the organisation then embarked on a partial return to a stronger focus on scientific research. The changes at CSIR have had profound impacts on the careers of researchers and on the way that research is done. This presentation draws lessons from actual stories or anecdotes to point out pitfalls and opportunities for researchers that often struggle to deal with contemporary changes in the research workplace. Key points for consideration in the context of a changing science business model include: respect for the soul or identity of a researcher; the right pace for the research race; mental and physical workspace requirements; and how to participate in the global learning system. Dr Dirk Roux is a limnologist working at the CSIR Natural Resources and the Environment unit, South Africa. Wednesday 7 November 2007 at 11am Abstract: The environmental behaviour of NDMA (nitrosodimethylamine) a by-product of wastewater chlorination is showed. NDMA is a potent carcinogen that is often present in municipal wastewater effluents. To better understand the loss pathways for NDMA in landcape irrigation systems, a mass balance approach was employed using in situ lysimeters treated with 14C-NDMA. The total contents and the chemical and mineralogical forms of heavy metals in different kind of soil, agricultural, industrial and urban, are presented. Friday 9 November 2007 at 11am Abstract: The increasing complexity of water- and environmental-resource problems requires modeling approaches that incorporate knowledge from a broad range of scientific and software disciplines. To address these needs, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) developed the Modular Modeling System (MMS). More recently, a collaborative effort between the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the USGS is migrating MMS models and tools to the Java-based Object Modeling System (OMS). MMS and OMS are integrated systems of computer software for model development, integration, and application. The modular design allows a high level of flexibility and adaptability to enable modelers to incorporate their own software into an array of existing models and modeling tools. These include individual hydrologic- and environmental-process models, coupled models, and fully integrated decision support systems. Supported USGS models in MMS include the watershed model PRMS, a watershed and geochemical model WEBMOD, and a fully coupled surface-water/ground-water model GSFLOW. MMS has been coupled with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation object-oriented reservoir and river-system modeling framework, RiverWare, to provide models and tools to evaluate and apply optimal resource-allocation and management strategies to complex, operational decisions on multipurpose reservoir systems and watersheds. OMS is being coupled with the U.S. Forest Service vegetation dynamics model SIMPPLLE to assess the effects of alternative vegetation-management strategies on a variety of hydrological and ecological responses. Thursday 22 November 2007 at 11am Abstract: Some areas of the Wheatbelt of Western Australia suffer from an excess of saline, acidic, metal-containing groundwater that can lead to problems for managing drainage. This study demonstrated that sulfate-reducing fluidised-bed bioreactors are technically capable of treating Wheatbelt groundwaters so as to reduce acidity and to remove most of the undesirable metal contaminants. The minimum hydraulic retention time for a stable process with groundwater from the region of Narembeen was more than 16 hours, and approximately 2 hours for more benign groundwater from Kellerberrin. The removal of metal contaminants and pH increase produced by the bioreactor process would lessen the environmental impacts of these waters should they subsequently be disposed to lakes and wetlands. Salts that are relatively free of metal contaminants can be produced from water that has been treated by the sulfate-reducing bioreactor, whereas salts produced by evaporation of untreated saline groundwater from Narembeen contains significant metal concentrations. Unfortunately, it is unlikely that metal precipitates captured from Wheatbelt waters by the process would be of economic value because of the difficulties of extracting specific metals from the mixed-metal precipitate. It may be possible to interface this process with desalination for local production of potable water. The cost of the bioreactor treatment of Narembeen water was estimated at approximately $3.70 kL–1, although extrapolation of full-scale process costs from laboratory experimentation should be treated with great caution. Groundwater control may be required at many Wheatbelt towns in the future. Management costs to protect biodiversity and infrastructure assets from salinisation in the Wheatbelt could be as high as $2,968 million (Sparks et al., 2006). If sulfate-reducing fluidised bed reactor technology was considered appropriate at larger scale, a decision for its use would be based on the necessity to take action and the comparative effectiveness and costs of competing technologies. Wednesday 28 November 2007 at 11am What does the Cuyahoga River (Ohio, USA) have to do with the management of Great Barrier Reef Lagoon catchments? Are TMDLs and TMPLs related? The Framework for Marine and Estuarine Water Quality requires Water Quality Improvement Plans for catchments discharging to the Great Barrrier Reef Lagoon. WQIPs must identify environmental values, set Total Maximum Pollutant Load targets to achieve and maintain these values, set interim pollutant targets, and lay out management actions to achieve the interim targets. Uncertainty in our understanding of the system is to be reflected by incorporating a Margin of Safety in the definitions of theTMPLs and by providing Reasonable Assurance that management actions will result in compliance with the interim targets. In this talk I will provide a (very) brief history of TMDLs and some preliminary thoughts about how Margin of Safety and Reasonable Assurance concepts might be applied in the GBR catchments. |
|
|
Copyright | Legal Notice and Disclaimer | Privacy Statement | Website Information Last updated: 15 June, 2011 |
||
This
work is part of the Australian Water Availability Project, a
joint effort by CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research, the
Bureau of Meteorology and the Bureau of Rural Science.