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CRC's

Water CRC

The eWater Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) commenced in July 2005 and is the largest Australian R&D organisation focussing solely on the water cycle. The “e” in eWater stands for enterprise, education, and environment. eWater CRC’s aim is to research, build and support solutions for total water cycle management in urban and rural catchments, integrating water quality and quantity, stream ecology and economics. The eWater Cooperative Research Centre incorporates new partner organisations as well as those from the former successful CRCs for Catchment Hydrology and Freshwater Ecology. A total of 47 organisations have invested in eWater.

Grace Mitchell is the Urban Systems and Design Program Leader for the eWaterCRC Program 5 - Urban Systems & Design

eWaterCRC Program 5 - Urban Systems & Design

This research program is providing the science for design of innovative water management solutions and infrastructure approaches for new and existing urban areas. The research is addressing such issues as innovative system design and configuration, enhancing the capacity of aging infrastructure, and increasing system resilience to accommodate the pressures of human population growth and climate variability. The ultimate objective is to give planners, managers and designers the capacity to develop or maintain an integrated urban water cycle that sustains urban communities, upstream and downstream ecosystems and the broader economy, at scales ranging from a single house-lot to metropolitan regions.

To provide the capacity to optimise water-cycle management for multiple users and objectives, including ecosystem restoration and water service provision in an urban catchment context.

The research is enabling urban-water-cycle components to be integrated in innovative systems for greenfield, in-fill and re-development, to meet environmental, social and economic criteria. It involves developing methods which can be applied to the full range of spatial scales, accounting for short-term and long-term changes; applying optimisation and decision-support tools; building and validating planning and management tools; and evaluating existing structural and non-structural water technologies and techniques.

Components for the Urban Water Systems package.

• Scaling, technologies and system analysis for urban water management - Project Leader: Dr Grace Mitchell
• Innovative WSUD intervention strategies to support evolving urban form - Project Leader: Peter Coombes

CRC for Water Quality and Treatment (CRCWQT)

Links with CRCWQT are through the work on development of models of pathogen runoff from large catchments. The aim of this research that is fully funded by CRCWQT is to determine and test a model for prediction of waterborne pathogen concentrations in runoff from catchments and in stream environments. This will entail developing a computer model describing pathogen movement that will be coupled to an existing hydrologic model.