Matt Colloff

Australian National University | ANU

The Murray–Darling Basin Plan, a major initiative to return water from irrigators to the environment, has been lauded as world-class water reform. The enabling legislation for the Basin Plan, the Water Act, gains its constitutional legitimacy from international treaties such as the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands. This Act mandated that water be retu...

As the impacts of climate change and water demands from irrigation continue to increase in the Murray–Darling Basin, water for the environment is becoming more scarce and the ecological conditions of many wetlands is poor. With water scarcity, conservation triage is becoming an increasingly relevant management option for environmental watering of w...

As decisions on climate change adaptation involve stakeholders with different values, beliefs and attitudes (VBA), decision outcomes depend on how stakeholders interact and how power is distributed. In this paper, we explore the VBA of stakeholders involved in three water management projects focusing on dams, micro-reservoirs, or wetlands in a Peru...

Protected areas are central for long‐term conservation of biodiversity and can potentially support climate change mitigation. But protected areas are also affected by climate change. Managers and scientists are increasingly facing the difficult task of making decisions under rapid change. Understanding individual and institutional futures considera...

Climate change has increased the variability of river inflows in the Murray-Darling Basin, threatening the viability of irrigated agriculture, food processing industries and ecological condition of wetlands. With increasing water scarcity, decision makers and communities face heightened contestation over scarce water resources and trade-offs and ad...

Twenty-four new species of Eutegaeoidea from Australia and New Caledonia are described, and two new genera proposed. These are Eutegaeus woiwurrung sp. nov., E. nothofagi sp. nov., E. bidhawal sp. nov., E. ptilosus sp. nov., Humerotegaeus carinatus gen. et sp. nov., H. concentricus gen. et sp. nov., Atalotegaeus crobylus sp. nov., Neoeutegaeus tors...

Environmental water requirements (EWRs) are the flows required to keep aquatic ecosystems healthy. We explored if EWRs had been met across aquatic ecosystems in the Murray–Darling Basin over the last four decades, finding that at 65% of assessed sites they had not been achieved. The most recent decade since Basin Plan legislation has seen some impr...

Two of Australia’s iconic river systems, Baaka in New South Wales (NSW) and Martuwarra in Western Australia (WA), are described in a narrative that connects Indigenous custodianship, bio-physical features and art, and contrasts settler law with First Law to provide multiple ways of seeing the two river systems. Our narrative is a shared response to...

Using a three-infrastructures (grey, soft, and green) framework, we examined key risks to water availability and quality in the Murray-Darling Basin, Australia. These risks include increased irrigation efficiency, without a quantitative knowledge of the impact on water flow pathways, particularly return flows, growth in farm dams and floodplain har...

Risks to shared water resources in the Murray–Darling Basin are reviewed after the report by CSIRO on the same topic in 2006. CSIRO outlined six major risks to shared water resources in the Basin. Herein, six groups of researchers have reviewed the risks of climate change, forest growth, groundwater, water infrastructure, water quality, and governa...

Governments love the idea of a win-win-even when it doesn't exist. That's why Victoria has been spending millions on planning "red gum irrigation ponds"-essentially, engineered wetlands along the River Murray. These wetlands are designed to save some red gum ecosystems, leave many others to decline, and redirect billions of litres of water promised...

The floodplain wetlands of northern Victoria are crucial for conservation of biodiversity and the livelihoods of people. Extensive ecosystem degradation and recent extreme floods and droughts have highlighted the urgent need for more sustainable management. We draw on expertise in ecology, hydrology, climatology and governance to synthesise key kno...

Adaptive water governance scholarship aspires to flexible and responsive governance that is inclusive and supports learning and collaboration among a wide range of stakeholders. Much of this scholarship assumes that polycentric arrangements will facilitate these characteristics as different nodes of decision making adapt and respond to challenges w...

Context: Increasing water scarcity creates the major challenge of how to achieve environmental outcomes while meeting human water demands. In the Murray–Darling Basin, Australia, this challenge is being addressed by the Murray–Darling Basin Plan and the ‘Sustainable Diversion Limit Adjustment Mechanism’ (SDLAM), an offsetting program seeking to ach...

It is well established that forest conservation, restoration, and sustainable management of forests and trees outside forests can help to reduce the vulnerability of both humans and ecosystems to climate change. Yet the role of forests and trees in providing multiple goods and services that contribute to the adaptive capacity and resilience of soci...

The supplementary material contains the following content: Figure S1. Names of Indigenous jurisdictions included in the analyses (excluding areas smaller than 400 km2); Figure S2. Names of Aboriginal Land Councils i New South Wales included in the analyses; Table S1. Estimated distribution and percentage extent of wetlands contained within each Ind...

Context: water managers in the Murray–Darling Basin increasingly recognise the cultural and environmental benefits generated by Indigenous co-management of environmental water. However, traditional knowledge and values are subsidiary to western technical and scientific perceptions when prioritising environmental water use. Aims and methods: we mapp...

New species and a new genus of polypterozetoid oribatid mite are described from wet habitats in forests in southeastern Australia: Tumerozetes roughleyi sp. nov. (Tumerozetidae), Nodocepheus luxtoni sp. nov. and Sacculella yarra gen. et sp. nov. (Nodocepheidae). The superfamily Polypterozetoidea has not been recorded previously from Australia. Tume...

Indigenous trees play key roles in West African landscapes, such as the néré tree (Parkia biglobosa (Jacq.) R.Br. ex G.Don). We applied social–ecological network analysis to understand the social–ecological interactions around néré. We documented the benefits néré provides and the multiple social interactions it creates amongst a large range of act...

Freshwater ecosystems are among the most vulnerable and endangered in the world, facing continued uncertainty under climate change, development of water resources and land use change. The Ramsar Convention on Wetlands (1971) is one of the longest-standing international agreements on biodiversity conservation. Its central objective is the maintenanc...

Climatically driven perturbations (e.g. intense drought, fire, sea surface temperature rise) can bring ecosystems that are already stressed by long-term climate change and other anthropogenic impacts to a point of collapse. Recent reviews of the responses of Australian ecosystems to climate change and associated stressors have suggested widespread...

Water resources for irrigation in the Murray-Darling Basin have been heavily over-allocated, with major detrimental effects on wetlands and rivers. The Murray-Darling Basin Plan is intended to return water from irrigated agriculture to the environment but requires comprehensive, accurate water accounting to achieve this objective. Floodplain harves...

This is a rejoinder to Stewardson et al. ‘The politicisation of science in the Murray–Darling Basin, Australia: discussion of ‘Scientific integrity, public policy and water governance’’ published online in the Australasian Journal of Water Resources (AJWR) on 29th October 2021. Stewardson et al. (2021) was a comment on an earlier published article...

There is global interest in enhancing the ecosystem services provided by landscapes and catchments dominated by plantation (monoculture) forestry. Partial reversion of plantations to locally native species (reforestation) is one option. However, the ecological outcomes of this kind of plantation reversion are poorly known. The partial reforestation...

Figure S1. Typical ‘trough’ patch of regularly spaced depressions formed by forestry cultivation machinery 13 years previously. Depressions were typically 5-10 cm deep and 20-50 cm wide and often had high cover of grass, leaf litter and sticks. This image also shows a ‘bare mound’ inter-patch where resources are lost due to rainfall run-off (red ar...

The term 'adaptation' is commonplace in conservation research and practice, but often without a reflection on the assumptions, expectations, or frames of reference used to define goals and actions. Communities of practice (e.g. conservation researchers, protected areas managers) have different interpretations of climate change impacts on biodiversi...

Monitoring waterbird populations in Australia is challenging for reasons of counting logistics, and because population aggregation and dispersion can shift rapidly in response to large spatio-temporal variations in resource availability. The East Australian Waterbird survey has conducted annual, aerial, systematic counts of waterbirds over eastern...

The Murray-Darling Basin Plan is a $AU 13 billion program to return water from irrigation use to the environment. Central to the success of the Plan, commenced in 2012, is the implementation of an Environmentally Sustainable Level of Take (ESLT) and a Sustainable Diversion Limit (SDL) on the volume of water that can be taken for consumptive use. Un...

Worldwide, floodplains have been alienated from river channels by dams, levee banks and other infrastructure, constructed for flood protection and water resource development for irrigation, constraining flows within-channel. Recently, several programs have restored connectivity, generating considerable ecological, social and economic benefits. As p...

We examine the impediments to scientific integrity with an analysis of the water science-policy interface for the Murray-Darling Basin (MDB), Australia. We highlight the dangers to the public interest of ‘administrative capture’ of science, whereby scientists are incentivised to narrow or close down the scientific questions asked, the debates on ev...

The cultural ecosystem services (CES) construct has evolved to accommodate multiple worldviews, knowledge systems and conceptualizations of nature and values, including relational and mental health values. Cultural ecosystem services research and practice has mostly focused on cognitive ways of constructing and expressing intangible values of, and...

The Murray–Darling Basin Plan was established with the objective of restoring water from irrigation to the environment, thereby conserving wetlands and biodiversity. We examined whether the Plan is achieving this objective by assessing whether environmental watering has helped conserve threatened flow-dependent fauna. Two frog species, two waterbir...

Ecosystems support the adaptation of societies to global changes through their contributions to people's quality of life. Ecosystem-based adaptation (EBA) implementation remains a challenge and will require changes of practices, structures and processes underpinning human and nature interactions, also considered as co-production of nature’s contrib...

Human actions have driven earth systems close to irreversible and profound change. The need to shift towards intentional transformative adaptation (ITA) is clear. Using case studies from the Transformative Adaptation Research Alliance (TARA), we explore ITA as a way of thinking and acting that is transformative in concept and objectives, but achiev...

Environmental flows are an integral component for conservation and management of rivers, floodplains and other wetlands in the Murray Darling Basin. Under the Basin Plan, environmental water is managed by the Commonwealth Environmental Water Office (CEWO) and the States. We assessed CEWO environmental flows (2014-15 to 2018-19), compared our findin...

Black Box (Eucalyptus largiflorens F. Muell.), is a keystone tree species of lowland semi-arid floodplain ecosystems in south-eastern Australia. E. largiflorens woodlands are of high conservation value and threatened by climate change-induced drought and irrigation water diversions due to their location on upper floodplain areas where flood frequen...

Details of documents used for the planning and implementation of environmental watering at Ramsar wetlands and the compliance ratings we assigned for the maintenance of ecological character. Ramsar wetlands are: Riverland, Gunbower Forest, Central Murray Forests, Macquarie Marshes, Narran Lakes and Gwydir Wetlands.

Raw data on counts of linkages

Table S1. The conservation status of the eight threatened species of flow-dependent fauna in the Murray–Darling Basin according to Commonwealth, State and Territory biodiversity conservation legislation. Table S2. Breeding sites of threatened species (based on Fig. 1) for determination of whether environmental flow events met the water requirement...

Global sustainability targets demand transformative changes. Nature-based solutions (NbS) are gaining traction in science and policy, but their potential for transformative change remains unexplored. We provide a framework to evaluate how NbS contribute to transformative change and apply it to 93 NbS from mountain social-ecological systems (SES). T...

Global sustainability targets demand transformative changes. Nature-based solutions (NbS) are gaining traction in science and policy, but their potential for transformative change remains unexplored. We provide a framework to evaluate how NbS contribute to transformative change and apply it to 93 NbS from mountain social-ecological systems (SES). T...

Social network analysis statistics (degree centrality) for 1) signatories of the open letter from scientists on the Murray-Darling Basin and 2) researchers who gave evidence to the Murray-Darling Basin Royal Commission

Objectives Observations from wetlands across the globe suggest a consistent pattern of woody encroachment into wetland grasslands, altering habitat structure and ecological function. The extent to which hydrological changes have contributed to woody invasion of wetland grasslands is unclear. Our objective was to compare rates of woody encroachment...

Details of benefits from ecosystem services from constraints relaxation of river flows in the Murray-Darling Basin for: provisioning, regulating and cultural services, with references.

Protected area managers rely on relevant, credible, and legitimate knowledge. However, an increase in the rate, extent, severity, and magnitude of the impacts of drivers of change (e.g., climate change, altered land use, and demand for natural resources) is affecting the response capacity of managers and their agencies. We address temporal aspects...

The book is an exploration of Australia's country’s diverse landscapes and examines how a re-engagement with the environment may offer all of us a shared path to reconciliation. On this ancient continent, waves of people have made their mark on the landscape; in turn, it too has shaped them. If we look afresh at our history through the land we live...

Under climate change extremes of rainfall and weather events will challenge water managers already struggling to address Australia's cycles of flood and drought. Failures in water supply became starkly apparent during the most recent drought (2016-2020) as regional towns ran out of water and governments scrambled to plan and build more dams and pip...

Australia’s water reform project is failing to fully deliver for all Australians. With the COVID-19 pandemic, long-accepted approaches are being questioned in many areas of national policy. This also applies to water reform. The Australian bush fires of 2019-20 mean that Australians can no longer ignore the devastating impacts of natural disasters...

Transformation of social-ecological systems due to climate change requires, transformative adaptation responses. We propose the concept of nature's contribution to adaptation (NCA; previously called adaptation services), to reveal properties of ecosystems that provide options for future livelihoods and adaptation to transformative change. Knowledge...

Ecosystems provide people with services that enable adaptation to climate change, which we refer to here as ‘adaptation services’. But adaptation services do not flow automatically: some input from people is needed. We identified five types of mechanisms that support the production of adaptation services. These mechanisms are related to: (i) multif...

Ecosystems can sustain social adaptation to environmental change by protecting people from climate change effects and providing options for sustaining material and non-material benefits as ecological structure and functions transform. Along adaptation pathways, people navigate the trade-offs between different ecosystem contributions to adaptation,...

Several independent findings about the current state of the environment and water management in the Murray-Darling Basin were released in early 2019 by the South Australia Murray-Darling Basin Royal Commission, the Australian Productivity Commission, and the Australian Academy of Science. We review these findings in relation to: an environmentally...

Narratives emerging from the interaction between science and policy set the common language for understanding complex environmental issues. We explore discourses of contestation over a major environmental policy, the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, intended to re-allocate irrigation water to restore the environment in southeastern Australia. We examine...

For sustaining ecosystem functions and services, environmental conservation strategies increasingly target to maintain the multiple facets of biodiversity, such as functional diversity (FD) and phylogenetic diversity (PD), not just taxonomic diversity (TD). However, spatial mismatches among these components of biodiversity can impose challenges for...

Five new species of Topalia (Nosybeidae) are described from Australia: Topalia caliginosa sp. nov. from Victoria, T. corinnensis sp. nov. from Tasmania, T. dunlopi sp. nov. and T. katyae sp. nov. from Norfolk Island and T. royi sp. nov. from New South Wales. The genus was known previously from Australia from unidentified specimens only. I revise th...

Water resources and water-related ecosystem services are vital to social–ecological systems, yet in many parts of the world water as a finite resource is revealed by its unsustainable and inequitable use. Increased threats to water security and supply of ecosystem services arise due to increasing and contested demand and declining supply due to cli...

Land restoration will happen under climate change and different knowledge systems are needed to navigate uncertainties and plan adaptation. The emergence of novel ecosystems presents a challenge for land restoration; they harbour unknown unknowns. This brief presents key research linking land restoration and societal adaptation and an example of a...

Mountain social-ecological systems (SES) supply important ecosystem services that are threatened by climate change. In mountain SES there is a paradox between high community capacity to cope with extremes, and governance structures and processes that constrain that capacity from being realised. Climate adaptation that maintain livelihoods and suppl...

This handbook outlines a highly successful workshop process for developing community-based adaptation pathways for livelihoods. The workshop process was part of the Community-led Adaptation Pathways in the Solomon Islands Project (CAPSI; 2018-2020). Our intent is to support multi-stakeholder livelihood co-production planning and adaptation in Solom...