Identification of corridors of river recovery for NSW Hawkesbury Nepean catchments

By connecting corridors of river recovery, resilience can be built into river systems to mitigate against future floods and droughts driven by anthropogenic disturbance or climate extremes. This database can be used to systematically analyse where corridors of geomorphic river recovery could be created via conservation or rehabilitation. Analysis is undertaken in ArcGIS using the recovery potential layer of the Open Access NSW River Styles database that is available from DPIE (www.dpie.nsw.gov.au). The River Styles database was accessed in January 2021. The database and associated workflow identifies reach and loci connections based on different combinations of recovery potential classes. Reach connections are defined as an upstream to downstream section of river that is connected end-to-end, and loci connections are defined as isolated sections of river from which recovery can be seeded and extended into adjacent reaches. This map for all freshwater stream length of the NSW Hawkesbury Nepean catchments, shows the spatial distribution of thirteen connections based on combinations and sequences of conservation, strategic and high recovery potential targets. Other connections of interest to river practitioners can be identified and >80 different user-defined scenarios run using a workflow available at protocols.io.

Attribution to: Macquarie University, D Agnew and K Fryirs (2022) Corridors of river recovery database and workflow. Data accessed from The Sharing and Enabling Environmental Data Portal.

This work is funded by an Australian Research Council Linkage project based at Macquarie University with industry partners Landcare Australia and Hunter-Central Rivers Local Land Services.

This work is published in two Open Access papers:

• Agnew D, Fryirs K (2022) Identifying corridors of river recovery in coastal NSW Australia, for use in river management decision support and prioritisation systems. PLoS ONE 17(6): e0270285. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0270285
• Agnew D, Graves BP, Fryirs K (2022) A GIS workflow for the identification of corridors of geomorphic river recovery across landscapes. PLoS ONE 17(12): e0278831. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0278831

The workflow is available at: https://www.protocols.io/view/a-gis-workflow-for-the-identification-of-corridors-n2bvj8625gk5/v1