Featured paper
Walsh, C. J., Imberger, M. J., Burns, M. J., Fletcher, T. D., & Bos, D. G. (2022). Dispersed urban-stormwater control improved stream water quality in a catchment-scale experiment. Water Resources Research, e2022WR032041.An outcome of the Little Stringybark Creek experiment, which aimed to test if creeks downstream of stormwater drainage can be restored. 100s of rain-gardens that allow to water soak into surrounding soils and be taken up by plants, and rainwater tanks for harvesting, were installed in two suburban catchments. Comparing water quality before and after installation, in experimental streams, and in urban control and reference forested streams, we showed that filtering and harvesting stormwater reduced summer temperatures and reduced concentrations of phosphorus and nitrogen, critical contaminants for healthy streams. The reductions were greatest in dry weather, and after small amounts of rain. To achieve water quality similar to forested streams, we need rain-gardens and harvesting systems that catch runoff from nearly every roof and road upstream. Achieving that will require reserving space near pipe outlets to streams for final treatment systems, and finding ways to use the excess water generated by roofs and roads. DOI: 10.1029/2022WR032041
Projects
Little Stringybark Creek Project
Wetland Forest Restoration
My Raingarden diary
Recent posts
Seasons Greetings from urbanstreams.net
The back raingarden has taken a festive turn, courtesy of recycled orange bags that I’ve put over the grape bunches in the vain hope that we might score more grapes than the birds this year. We do love the rainbow lorikeets visiting, but they are much less frequent visitors/pillagers than…
New features for the Melbourne stream network app
The Melbourne Stream Network app allows you to explore the streams and rivers of the Melbourne region. Until now, the app was challenging if you weren’t sure of the name of the stream you were looking for. I’ve now changed some settings and added features to make it easier to…
A new paper in Ecological Applications
Congratulations to Julia White for the first paper from her PhD published in Ecological Applications. In the paper we report on an experiment testing if wood with more surface complexity would be colonised by more individuals of and more species of invertebrates (as expected by ecological theory, but inconsistently detected),…
New server, new look, new content
urbanstreams.net has moved to a new server. To celebrate the move, I have spent some time giving the site a spruce-up: please have a look around. As previously announced, the interactive apps that urbanstreams.net used to host have moved to a separate server. My aim for urbanstreams.net now is for…
This site is maintained by Chris Walsh,
Principal Research Fellow in the Waterway Ecosystem Research Group,
School of Ecosystem and Forest Sciences at The University of Melbourne.
He lives in Richmond, where he obsesses about his
house's stormwater runoff.
His research contributes to the Melbourne Waterway Research-Practice Partnership.
Other resources for Chris's research include:
Google Scholar,
The Open Science Framework,
GitHub,
The University of Melbourne's 'Find and Expert' page.
Contact details.
Waterway Ecosystem Research Group,
School of Ecosystem and Forest Sciences
The University of Melbourne Burnley Campus
Building 903, 500 Yarra Boulevard
Burnley Victoria 3121, Australia
Tel: +613 8344 9155
Fax: +613 9349 4218
e-mail: cwalsh@unimelb.edu.au
For directions to the WERG,
click on the pointer in this version of the map.
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