Australian Catchment, River and Estuary Assessment 2002
National Land and Water Resources Audit, 2002
ISBN 0 642 37125 3
Narrowing the window of comparison
State/Territory case study
One of the main limitations of the method used by the catchment condition assessment is that the condition assessments are relative. This relativity is Australia wide and is not set in the context of any performance thresholds. Australia is yet to develop and agree to performance thresholds for catchment condition.
To address this limitation, the window of analysis can be narrowed to a specific region or State/Territory. This reduces both:
- the range of variability in compared biophysical settings; and
- the probability that the distribution of condition values will be skewed by patterns external to the area of interest.
The CatCon catchment condition analysis system can readily adjust the window of analysis used for calculating the relative assessments of catchment condition. An example output of the composite catchment condition index for Victoria is shown in Figure 30.
Narrowing the window of analysis also provides the opportunity to overcome another limitation of the assessment method - the use of finer-scale data sets that might only be available for one region or State. Finer scale data can be loaded into the CatCon system and used to provide analyses that better serve specific catchment management needs.
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