Water Assessment Aquatic Ecology Report Series
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Water Assessment Aquatic Ecology Report Series Review of the Tasmanian River Health Monitoring Program (1994-2016): Program Evaluation and Redirection November 2018 ISSN: 1835-9523 Report No. WMA 18/01 Water Assessment Branch Water and Marine Resources Division Department of Primary Industries, Parks, Water and Environment Copyright notice Material contained in the report provided is subject to Australian copyright law. Other than in accordance with the Copyright Act 1968 of the Commonwealth Parliament, no part of this report may, in any form or by any means, be reproduced, transmitted or used. This report cannot be redistributed for any commercial purpose whatsoever, or distributed to a third party for such purpose, without prior written permission being sought from the Department of Primary Industries, Parks, Water and Environment (DPIPWE), on behalf of the Crown in Right of the State of Tasmania. Disclaimer Whilst DPIPWE has made every attempt to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the information and data provided, it is the responsibility of the data user to make their own decisions about the accuracy, currency, reliability and correctness of information provided. The Department of Primary Industries, Parks, Water and Environment, its employees and agents, and the Crown in the Right of the State of Tasmania do not accept any liability for any damage caused by, or economic loss arising from, reliance on this information. Preferred citation DPIPWE (2018). Review of the Tasmanian River Health Monitoring Program (1994-2016): Program Evaluation and Redirection. Water Assessment Aquatic Ecology Report Series, Report No. WMA 18/01. Water and Marine Resources Division. Department of Primary, Industries, Parks, Water and Environment, Hobart, Tasmania. Contact details Department of Primary Industries, Parks, Water and Environment Water Management and Assessment 13 St Johns Avenue, New Town Phone: 03 6165 3271 Web: www.dpipwe.tas.gov.au Email: [email protected] Cover page images Top left: Frome River upstream of Frome Dam; a reference site that was monitored in 2012/13 during an assessment of the condition of the upper Ringarooma River catchment. Bottom left: Mountain River at Ranelagh Bridge; a test site that has been monitored regularly since 1998. Right: Tom Krasnicki (DPIPWE) processing (‘live picking’) a macroinvertebrate sample from the upper Mersey River, northern Tasmania. The Department of Primary Industries, Parks, Water and Environment The Department of Primary Industries, Parks, Water and Environment (DPIPWE) is responsible for the sustainable management and protection of Tasmania's natural and cultural assets for the benefit of Tasmanian communities and the economy. DPIPWE's activities guide and support the use and management of Tasmania's land and water resources and protect and promote its natural, built and cultural assets. The Department is also responsible for delivering the services that support primary industry development and for the protection of the State's relative disease and pest-free status. The Water and Marine Resources Division of DPIPWE provides services that contribute towards the sustainable use and management of the State's water resources. This includes: the design of policy and regulatory frameworks to ensure the equitable, efficient and sustainable allocation and use of surface and groundwater resources and the safety of dams; monitoring and assessment of the condition of the State's freshwater resources; and supporting the development of new irrigation schemes. Review of the RHMP: Program Evaluation and Redirection Executive summary Since 1994, the Tasmanian State Government has conducted broad-scale monitoring of river condition in the State under the Tasmanian River Health Monitoring Program (RHMP). The RHMP employs Australian River Assessment System (AusRivAS) protocols, which focus on benthic macroinvertebrate (waterbug) communities and habitat quality. The RHMP provides the only long-term, broad-scale monitoring of river ecosystem health in Tasmania, and supports State Government legislation (e.g. Tasmanian Water Management Act 1999 and Environmental Management and Pollution Control Act 1994) and State Policy (e.g. State Policy on Water Quality Management 1997) that governs the management of freshwater ecosystems in the State. The RHMP is, therefore, a valuable tool for managing rivers and catchments in Tasmania. The Water and Marine Resources Division of the Department of Primary Industries, Parks, Water and Environment (DPIPWE) is responsible for the RHMP. The key activities of this Division that relate to water are governed by the Water Management Act 1999 and focus on the sustainable management of water resources in freshwater-dependent ecosystems. The RHMP provides crucial surveillance monitoring that supports the objectives of the Water Management Act 1999, and DPIPWE’s decision-making and regulatory procedures for managing water in Tasmania. Since the RHMP began, land and water management in Tasmania has changed substantially and river health science has progressed. Therefore, this review was undertaken to ensure the RHMP aligns with the work of the Water and Marine Resources Division of DPIPWE in the short- and long-term, while also considering what the program delivers more broadly to natural resource management. This review assesses the value of the RHMP and the information it is providing, and revises the design and structure of the program. The aims of this review were to: Document the history of the RHMP. Assess links to legislation and uses of data from the RHMP. Assess the applicability of other measures of river condition to the RHMP. Evaluate the value of abiotic (physical) and biotic (biological) data collected by the RHMP. Examine RHMP data to investigate macroinvertebrate communities and river condition in Tasmania. iii Review of the RHMP: Program Evaluation and Redirection Revise the purpose, design and structure of the RHMP. Between 1994 and 2000, the RHMP was associated with several state and/or national programs. These were components of the National River Health Program (NRHP), which was a Commonwealth and state collaboration that developed AusRivAS. Between 2001 and 2012, the RHMP was associated with the Tasmanian State Government’s TasTogether 2020 plan. Since 2012, the RHMP has not been linked to any external funding sources or programs; however, it has continued to be resourced by DPIPWE and provides valuable environmental science to support water management and planning in Tasmania. Due to river condition sampling in the RHMP, and project-based monitoring of river health by DPIPWE and other agencies in Tasmania, the RHMP database currently has AusRivAS sampling records for 7288 samplings across 959 sites. This is a powerful dataset that can be used to address a range of questions relating to land and water management, and river health. To date, outputs from the RHMP have been used by DPIPWE, other agencies and researchers for a range of purposes relating to the management of water and natural resources at varying spatial and temporal scales. Examples of these applications include: examining impacts from point-source pollution, determining the condition of rivers in selected catchments, assessing broad-scale effects of low flows on rivers, and national State of Environment reporting. In addition, recent studies in Australia have shown that analysis of taxonomic data from AusRivAS sampling can be used to examine ecological responses to various types of disturbances (e.g. agricultural land use, drought). Since the RHMP began, broad-scale bioassessment programs and methods for assessing river condition have advanced in Australia and other countries. Holistic strategies that integrate measures of several ecosystem components are now advocated and employed commonly. The Tasmanian River Condition Index (TRCI), which was developed in 2009, is an example of such an approach. However, the full TRCI approach is too onerous and time- consuming to fit into the RHMP, which seeks to perform rapid bioassessments across a large network of riverine sites on a regular basis. Overall, the current design of the RHMP was found to have several limitations. In particular, at present the RHMP focuses on a single biological indicator group (aquatic macroinvertebrates) to measure riverine health. This limits its ability to holistically assess the overall state of a river. Furthermore, the accuracy and precision of measurements of several habitat parameters was found to be low. Based on the findings of recent studies and analyses undertaken in this review, macroinvertebrate data and AusRivAS model outputs from the RHMP are able to detect changes in river condition due to anthropogenic iv Review of the RHMP: Program Evaluation and Redirection pressures. However, of the 48 habitat-related variables that were considered to have sufficient explanatory power to warrant evaluation, 17 (35%) were rated as poor, 23 (48%) were rated as moderate and 8 (17%) were rated as good in terms of meaningfulness and usefulness. Therefore, this review recommends that some variables cease to be monitored, monitoring methods for some variables be improved, and a number of new variables be included, in line with other contemporary riverine monitoring programs. Moreover, this review recommends that more rigorous benthic sediment and algal sampling be included in the RHMP to broaden its approach to assessing river health. Preliminary, analysis of 311 sites that were sampled using