The focus of water resource management in the Murray-Darling Basin over recent decades has been to achieve a healthy working Basin. The Commonwealth Government has made significant investments in research, monitoring and evaluation that aims to achieve continual improvement in the outcomes of water resource management. However, there remains a focus on a limited number of species and key sites rather than a more holistic approach to protecting and restoring water-dependent ecosystems. In particular, the importance of ecosystem functions in maintaining a healthy Basin, and understanding of their environmental watering requirements, has been a gap in the ability to protect and restore water-dependent ecosystems across the Basin.
Commonwealth Department of Climate Change, Energy, Environment and Water invested in a $3 million research project with the CSIRO which aims to improve our understanding of the importance of ecosystem functions at the Basin-scale. Novel modelling and data merging methods were applied to understand how key ecosystem functions, such as lateral and longitudinal hydrological connectivity, habitat provisioning, terrestrial, floodplain and in-stream productivity, and biological movements, respond over space and time (~three decades). The project has created new knowledge that will guide management decisions and investments in future monitoring. In this talk, we present a summary of key scientific outcomes and investigate the interactions between different ecosystem functions in the Basin.