Synopsis (Why did you do it, What did you do, What have you learned, Why does it matter):
- A key challenge for water resource planning is the quantification of the potential impacts of a drying climate on aquatic ecosystems. Global climate models are now routinely downscaled and applied to hydrological water planning models to allow the production of a large number of potential discharge scenarios. The Eco Risk Projector application is used by the Queensland government in water planning to quantify the ecological impact of hydrological alteration by modelling 30+ species and ecological processes.
- We implemented functionality in Eco Risk Projector to automatically ingest 1000’s of alternative hydrological scenarios generated from downscaled climate models which were subsequently applied to water planning hydrological models. Those scenarios are batch run across ecological species and process models and the results summarised and visualised to allow the interpretation of potential climate change impacts. The models are run on a site/node level, and the results aggregated across sites for a given species and scenario to explore the spatial risk of multiple failures across the landscape for a given scenario.
- We have learned that it is difficult to sensibly summarise and visualise large volumes of data in a way that is easy to interpret. We have also learned of the value of quantifying the broader spatial/system impact of climate change scenarios over and above considering single locations.
- This work matters in that the approach can be universally applied across any water planning area where daily flow data is generated to represent potential future climates.
Author and contributor information:
Zach is a senior software engineer and the computational lead at Truii, a Brisbane-based technology company that creates web-based solutions to support data driven planning and reporting. Zach has lead the development of Eco Risk Projector, with the assistance of Nick and Robin.
Glenn, Zoe, Kate and Jon are scientists in the Water Planning Ecology Science Division at the Department of Environment, Science and Innovation. Glenn, Zoe, Kate and Jon have provided the scientific expertise needed to develop Eco Risk Projector.
John is a senior hydrologist at the Department of Environment, Science and Innovation. John is heavily involved in the climate modelling space and has produced all the modelled data used to develop Eco Risk Projector.