It’s been a long time between posts (I’ve been away for much of the year: more on that later). This return to the blog is to announce the completion of the Melbourne Water Stream Network v1.0, now available at tools.thewerg.unimelb.edu.au/mwstr/*. The stream network is a spatial database, comprising a stream…
I’ve added another entry to my raingarden diary today, primarily spurred by (an old picture of) the raingarden featuring on the front cover of the current issue of ReNew magazine. (I see that the issue includes an article by friend of urbanstreams.net, Peter Coombes, on the performance of the rainwater harvesting…
Biodiversity offsets are a popular policy tool to atone for the damage done by land development. Trouble is, they often don’t achieve their stated aims of ‘offsetting’ the development’s biodiversity losses with conservation gains elsewhere. The problem is amplified if the animals and plants you are trying to protect live…
I was asked to give a talk to a meeting at Environmental Justice Australia’s community forum for Rivers of the West last night. As usual, I banged on about the importance of stormwater retention and harvesting to protect rivers and streams, including in dry areas like the west of Melbourne. …
Our raingardens and tank have been operating for over three years now. I have been too busy to do the stocktake on performance that I have been intending to do for the last 6 months, but even without doing so, it is clear that the impressive growth of the grapevine…
Matt Burns of the WERG has developed a new tool that has joined the urbanstreams.net family. The Baseflow Estimator can help assess how much water should be flowing down any stream (or drain) across the Melbourne region. Matt explains… For undeveloped, unregulated catchments, very little rainfall becomes streamflow. For example…
One of the central tenets of stream ecology—at least since Noel Hynes’ seminal lecture “The stream and its valley” (Hynes, 1975)—is that the catchment is a primary determinant of the structure and function of its stream. If a stream ecologist or a stream manager is to understand the behaviour of…
At the risk of sounding like a cracked record, I note that once again, summer urban flooding makes the newspaper, when not a drop of runoff has left our property during or after this afternoon’s intense downpour. Our tank is now a bit over half-full, and the two raingardens remain close…
In past posts about my rain-garden system, I’ve tended to focus on the water saving, food production and flood-mitigation benefits of systems like ours. But my main motivation and interest has always been how such systems can make our local rivers and streams healthier. Today, with a (very) little rain I witnessed,…