urbanstreams.net – Stream ecology, Raingarden Diary, Chris Walsh's blog

urbanstreams.net

Apps for waterway research and management

Research projects and publications

My raingarden diary

urbanstreams.net

A hub for projects and products of the Waterway Ecosystem Research Group at the University of Melbourne,
and the Melbourne Waterway Research-Practice Partnership,
...and for Chris Walsh's raingarden diary and his occasional ruminations.

Apps for waterway research and management

Use the WERG apps to find the best sized rainwater tank or raingarden design for your property, find your local creek and its catchment, explore bug data collected from sites across the Melbourne region and more....

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Research projects and publications

Projects and outputs of the Waterway Ecosystem Research Group and
the Melbourne Waterway Research-Practice partnership

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My raingarden diary

Six years on and Chris's family's raingarden and stormwater management system continue to hold back most of the runoff produced by his property, protecting the local river and reducing local flooding, while providing shade, water, food, and occasionally, wildlife.

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Featured paper

Bugnot, A.B., Hose, G.C., Walsh, C.J., Floerl, O., French, K., Dafforn, K.A., Hanford, J., Lowe, E.C. and Hahs, A.K. (2019). Urban impacts across realms: Making the case for inter-realm monitoring and management. Science of the Total Environment, 648, 711–719.

An output from a workshop at the University of New South Wales aiming to further collaboration between ecologists working in terrestrial, freshwater and marine realms. In this paper, we discuss that the terrestrial realm is most commonly a ‘net-donor’ of impacts, as most human activities occur on land and the resulting impacts are transferred to aquatic and atmospheric realms (although impacts in the reverse direction also occur). We conclude that, to achieve effective management strategies, greater collaboration is needed between scientists and managers focussing on different realms and regions and we present suggestions for approaches to achieve this.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2018.08.134

Projects

Little Stringybark Creek Project

Little Stringybark Creek Project

Can catchment-scale stormwater retention restore the hydrology, water quality & ecological structure and function of a degraded urban stream?

Wetland Forest Restoration

Wetland Forest Restoration

Reversing decline of the wetland forest in the Yellingbo Nature Conservation Reserve by reinstating a more natural flow regime

My Raingarden diary

My Raingarden diary

Building and living with a household stormwater retention system that protects the local river and reduces local flooding, while providing shade, water, food, and occasionally, wildlife.

Recent posts

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…

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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),…

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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…

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Not all leaky tanks are good

Maybe that’s just me. Can any leaky tank be good? Well, for many years, starting with the Little Stringybark Creek Project, we have been promoting tanks that leak for passive irrigation, as a good stormwater management solution. A well-designed leak (to an adequate garden space) does little to alter the…

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Contact

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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