Corridors of River Recovery for NSW Northern Rivers Catchments

Macquarie University researchers created a database and GIS workflow to identify corridors of geomorphic river recovery for freshwater streams in the NSW Northern Rivers catchments. The work, funded by an Australian Research Council Linkage project and published in two Open Access papers in 2022, analyzes 13 predefined connection types for conservation and rehabilitation planning. The underlying River Styles database was accessed in January 2021.

Use Cases

• Prioritizing river rehabilitation sites based on combinations of conservation, strategic, and high recovery potential targets.
• Modeling the spatial distribution of recovery corridors to build resilience against future floods and droughts.
• Running user-defined scenarios (over 80 possible) to identify alternative recovery corridor connections of interest.
• Supporting river management decision-making by identifying end-to-end reach connections and isolated loci connections for recovery seeding.

Strengths

• Based on the Open Access NSW River Styles database, a foundational geomorphic dataset.
• Includes a published GIS workflow available on protocols.io for reproducibility.
• Funded by an Australian Research Council Linkage project with industry partners, suggesting peer-reviewed methodology.
• Covers all freshwater stream length in the NSW Northern Rivers catchments.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Freshness should be verified; the core River Styles data was accessed in January 2021.

Provenance

Source

Macquarie University, D Agnew and K Fryirs (2022)

Collection Method

Analysis undertaken in ArcGIS using the recovery potential layer of the Open Access NSW River Styles database.

Time Range

River Styles database accessed January 2021; analysis published 2022.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-12 22:11:11.887729; freshness should be verified

Geography

Freshwater stream length of the NSW Northern Rivers catchments, Australia.