Non-GIS software

The Salinity Knowledge Base has been developed for the SW region of WA to bring together regionally relevant knowledge for advisers, land owners and land managers undertaking property scale planning and management to address salinity and associated issues. Design of the site is intended to align to the decision trees and requirements of users. It links best practices for planning and managing salinity with resources to support on-ground action. Members of the community of practice can collaborate online enriching the technical information with local content.

SafeGauge is a software application that assesses the potential risk for pesticide contamination of surface water and groundwater resulting from on-farm pesticide use. It has been developed specifically for use in the Queensland sugarcane industry. The system integrates soil hydrology, climatic records and site management practices with pesticide properties, to predict the risk of pesticides moving off-site and potentially entering water bodies. It does not assess risks to flora or fauna in the water body or the risks to human health.

The Modelling and Monitoring Assessment Decision Support System is designed to help select and review water assessments for coastal water impacts. The DSS is designed for state government officers involved with Environmental Impact Assessment. They may have science backgrounds but may not be familiar with water quality monitoring and modelling.

Some Features of the DSS:

• A process for narrowing down or reviewing assessments using predictive modelling approaches and monitoring and experimentation methods.
  Expert knowledge about the use and limitations of modelling approaches and monitoring and experimentation methods.
• Key documents in searchable help system format. The DSS draws on work done by the Coastal CRC such as OzCoast and OzEstuaries websites as well as associated Water Quality Guidelines.
• A focus on examining techniques based on:
  1. Environmental Stressors
  2. Environmental Indicators
  3. Environmental Processes
• Software search tool - the DSS provides a search tool to find existing simulation software classified under 25 sub-categories of Hydrodynamic, Process and Non-Process modelling approaches.
  • Hydrodynamic modelling approaches include: Box models (single or multiple) plus inverse exchange techniques; 1-dimensional vertical; 1-dimensional horizontal; 2-dimensional vertical;
    2-dimensional horizontal; 3-dimensional.
  • Process-based water quality models: Simple transport; Sediment transport; Sediment-Water column interaction; DO (Dissolved Oxygen); NPZ (nutrient-phytoplankton-zooplankton); CNPZ (NPZ plus carbon); NPZM (NPZ plus macrophytes); Contaminant; Pathogen; Phytoplankton (Population); Population; Foodweb.
  • Non process-based water quality models: Agent-based; Empirical relationship; Inverse nutrient; Bayesian belief network; Fuzzy logic; Artificial neural network.

Decision support for reserve system design. It finds reasonably efficient solutions to the problem of selecting a system of spatially cohesive sites that meet a suite of biodiversity targets. Given reasonably uniform data on species, habitats and/or other relevant biodiversity features and surrogates for a number of planning units Marxan minimizes the cost while meeting user-defined biodiversity targets. Ball, I. R. and H. P. Possingham, (2000)