Dr Davis says the big floods after a long dry season will give Project 25 its best insight yet into the content of the catchment\u2019s runoff.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese are interesting floods because they\u2019re what\u2019s referred to as \u2018first flush\u2019 events, so there\u2019s a lot of stuff that\u2019s accumulated or been applied throughout the catchment in the dry season that is being moved by this water all at once, so we\u2019ll definitely be looking closely at these results, because they\u2019ll give us the clearest picture of what\u2019s in the water.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat you\u2019ll see in the runoff really depends on what kind of activity is occurring in that catchment \u2013 in a catchment with more bananas or grazing you\u2019d typically expect to find more elevated suspended sediment, while in cane catchments you\u2019ll probably that shift toward fertilizers nutrients and pesticides.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe aim of the project is to provide more locally relevant water quality data to farmers in a region, which can assist decision-making and help guide practice change among the growers in these catchments to reduce potential runoff impacts.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe are always looking at ways of being able to reduce how much fertilizer and pesticides end up in the rivers because not only does that represent wasted spending for us, it\u2019s also going out to the Great Barrier Reef and causing problems there.<\/p>\n \u201cWe want to keep the Reef in good nick as much as anyone else and we\u2019re definitely keen to see how these measurements turn out so we can see what\u2019s working in reducing that runoff.\u201d<\/p>\n Dr Rebecca Bartley at CSIRO is running another Tropical Water Quality Hub project<\/a><\/strong> in the Burdekin region to test ways of reducing erosion in agricultural catchments.<\/p>\n \u201cI previously ran a 12-year study on erosion in the Burdekin and the results were very interesting \u2013 it highlighted that if we want to see an improvement in the water quality leaving the catchments and reaching the Reef, we need to be treating the dominant erosion source. This may seem pretty obvious, but in the past, we actually didn\u2019t know what the dominant sediment source was, so we tried a bit of everything. In the Burdekin, sediment tracing has now confirmed that gullies are a major source of sediment.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIn our Tropical Water Quality Hub project we are trialling different gully remediation techniques. These include stock management with fencing, revegetation of gully banks with native vegetation and installing what we call \u2018stick sausages\u2019, which are bundles of sticks wrapped up with chicken wire designed to slow the water down and get sediment to settle out.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe have a number of paired sites where we will treat one gully, and leave the other gully in its current condition. We then measure the water quality leaving these sites. This will give us a much clearer idea of what type of remediation approaches work, and how much we can expect them to reduce erosion and improve water quality.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThis research has actually never really been done before \u2013 everyone has had these assumptions about which techniques work, but until now we haven\u2019t had any quantitative data.\u00a0 Once we know which techniques work, we hope that there will be much greater up-take of remediation across the catchment.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Far North Queensland\u2019s wet season providing prime data for TWQ monitoring projects Every wet season, major rainfalls in Far North Queensland turn the Barron River and other major watercourses a … Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":3375,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-3379","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nesptropical.edu.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3379","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nesptropical.edu.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nesptropical.edu.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nesptropical.edu.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nesptropical.edu.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3379"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nesptropical.edu.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3379\/revisions"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nesptropical.edu.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3375"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nesptropical.edu.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/nesptropical.edu.au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/March-newsletter-1.jpg\")
Back to the March 2017 e-Newsletter contents<\/strong><\/a><\/h5>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"