Corridors of River Recovery for Sydney Metropolitan Catchments

A 2022 database from Macquarie University identifies corridors for river recovery in Sydney Metropolitan catchments. It maps thirteen connections based on conservation, strategic, and high recovery potential targets derived from the NSW River Styles database. The associated GIS workflow allows users to run over 80 different scenarios to analyze reach and loci connections for rehabilitation planning.

Use Cases

• Prioritizing river rehabilitation projects based on mapped recovery potential classes.
• Building resilience against floods and droughts by identifying connected corridors for conservation.
• Running user-defined scenarios to analyze different combinations of recovery potential for strategic planning.
• Seeding and extending recovery from isolated river sections (loci connections) into adjacent reaches.

Strengths

• Based on the Open Access NSW River Styles database, providing a foundational geomorphic layer.
• Includes a published GIS workflow enabling the analysis of over 80 user-defined scenarios.
• Peer-reviewed methodology published in two Open Access PLoS ONE papers.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Data is derived from a source database accessed in January 2021; underlying conditions may have changed.

Provenance

Source

Macquarie University, D Agnew and K Fryirs (2022). Data accessed from The Sharing and Enabling Environmental Data Portal.

Collection Method

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

Time Range

River Styles database accessed January 2021; analysis published 2022.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-12 23:57:58.191644; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Freshwater stream length of the NSW Sydney Metropolitan catchments, Australia.