A peek into Painkalac Creek
LOCAL conservation groups and interested individuals are working with Deakin University and Barwon Water to quantify the ecological response of Painkalac Creek to planned water releases from Painkalac Reservoir, near Moggs Creek.
The man-made reservoir supplied water to Aireys Inlet and Fairhaven until the townships were connected to the greater Geelong water supply network in 2016.
The reservoir was decommissioned, but has been maintained to ensure continued environmental flows into Painkalac Creek — which feeds the estuary at Aireys Inlet — and was opened to the public for recreational use in April last year.
The Painkalac Reservoir Environmental Flow Project will evaluate the impact of planned releases from the reservoir on the water quality and aquatic life of Painkalac Creek over a number of years.
“This collaborative community project is an example of working hand-in-hand with local citizens to protect the environment surrounding the Painkalac Reservoir,” said Barwon Water customers and community general manager Jo Murdoch.
“The feedback and views shared by the community has helped shape an environmental watering plan.”
The project will draw on data collected from the area over the years by conservation agencies and volunteers and new data to form a picture of conditions in the creek before and after environmental flows.
“We want to find out how the environmental flows affect the Painkalac Creek ecosystem and how we can involve the community in this,” said Associate Professor Rebecca Lester, co-deputy director of Deakin’s Centre for Regional and Rural Futures and lead researcher in the Quantitative Aquatic Ecosystem Laboratory, which works with industry, community and government groups to facilitate better environmental outcomes while maintaining socio-economic use of aquatic ecosystems.
“Some of the major goals we have for the project are to understand what happens in the creek when the water is released from the reservoir, how far down the creek it flows and how organisms living in the creek respond to the extra flows.”
As part of the project, ecol- ogist and Deakin and Barwon Water PhD student Krista Bonfantine plans to investigate how community-generated data can contribute to the evaluation of environmental flows and what could be done to improve the accuracy and robustness of such data.
“Data collected by volunteers with local knowledge of an area can be invaluable in providing a picture of what’s happening over time,” she said.
“We want to explore what else would be useful for informing policy and management of the creek that is reasonable to expect of volunteers,” she said.
“There are a lot of things to consider. What sort of training do people require in making sure equipment is properly calibrated, for example, and how do we continue to touch base to make sure people are still collecting what we think they’re collecting as new volunteers come in? Is what we’re asking them to do appropriate for their level of training?
“We also want them to feel the project is relevant to them, so it’s not just pure science looking to answer a question the community doesn’t find interesting.”