The Hills Shire Council commissioned the consultancy, Eco Logical Australia to progress and develop information systems for urban waterways to inform Council’s corporate asset management program.
The project focused on the 69 km of urban waterways that flow within and alongside of Council land.
The aims of this project were:
• to provide accurate mapping of all urban waterways;
• assess their condition (against a reference waterway); and
• develop a protocol to incorporate this information into Councils asset management system.
Section 2.2 of the report outlines the GIS methods and tools used to map and validate urban waterways in the
Hills Shire Council area.
The types of waterways within the study area include:
- natural creeks, rivers and wetlands
- rehabilitated channels and
- constructed channels, wetlands and detention basins.
To better understand and capture 'types' of natural waterways within Council's asset information systems, a review of possible frameworks to
categorise stream reaches into particular types was undertaken.
The
RiverStyles method was selected. The use of this method by council provides consistency with the regional Sydney Metropolitan CMA's
Waterways Health Strategy (2007) - see Related Resources below. Table 2 (page 17-20) of the report describes the 23 RiverStyle categories that were considered by the authors to be potentially applicable to the study area, and for which 'reference reaches' were sought within the LGA.
Section 2.4 briefly outlines the steps taken to break council owned and managed waterways into "Waterway Asset
Elements" - according to physical attributes such as confluences and road crossings. Waterway Asset Elements (starting at 50m lengths) were identified via desktop analysis then verified through field inspections. This section gives good detail on the spatial data that was used to complete this task.
Section 2.5 briefly describes a number of existing condition assessment methods considered for this project, including the Index of Stream Condition (ISC), Rapid Appraisal of Riparian Condition (RARC), Habitat Hectares and Biometric. A more comprehensive review is given in the Sydney Metropolitan CMA's Waterways Health Strategy - see Related Resources. A selection of indicators from these methods were used to trial a condition assessment protocol which also used additional, newly derived indicators. Appendix A details all the indicators used.
Section 2.5.4 further outlines the scoring methods and templates used to assess the condition of each Waterway Asset Element. The score given to any one stream reach was measured against the relevant RiverStyles derived "reference site" for that WAE. All data was compiled in formats compatible with council's asset management information systems.
The scoring provided within the condition assessment (1 to 5) will be used as part of Council asset management planning and assist in strategic asset management for waterways along with the prioritisation of future works.
This is a very good reference for councils who have not properly mapped, categorised or assessed the condition of their urban creeks; who are seeking to better integrate the management of natural urban waterways into corporate asset management systems.