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…
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),…
Thanks to Angela Ross and Annah Fromberg of the ABC for putting together their story on stormwater solutions featuring our raingarden. Nice work! It’s enough to shame me into keeping my new years resolution of resuming my raingarden story. The raingarden has really hit its straps this year, with a…
We have worked with Melbourne Water to collate their collection of macroinvertebrate assemblage records from streams of the Greater Melbourne region over the last 25 years into a database, and have made it available and searchable on an open-access web interface (https://tools.thewerg.unimelb.edu.au/mwbugs/). This rich resource of biological information has been…
Sure, this might be a bit niche, but in preparation for the imminent release of a portal for Melbourne Water’s stream macroinvertebrate database, I’ve created a data-entry app for compiling macroinvertebrate assemblage data into a table that is suitable for entry into the database (and suitable for analysis on its…
The desktop box that is urbanstreams.net is getting old. We are in the process of migrating the contents of this site to a more stable and secure location. The move has begun with our apps. Because he who is last will be first, the most recent app is the first…
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…
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…