Overcoming the challenges of monitoring and evaluating environmental flows through science-management partnerships

Abstract

Environmental flows programmes can be controversial, given that they transfer water from consumptive to environmental uses. It is, therefore, imperative that their performance is assessed against their anticipated ecological benefits. However, environmental flows present both technical and institutional challenges that cannot be addressed by traditional approaches to monitoring and evaluation. We present a framework that is currently being employed to evaluate the effectiveness of environmental flows in Victoria, Australia. The framework encourages a shift from expert-based models of ecological response to flow variation to those developed using the so-called 'evidence-based' methods that ha..