Stream Dynamics: A guide for hydrology and landscape design professions

Australia is home to a wide range of river types with highly variable rainfall and streamflow, supporting a diverse range of flora and fauna communities. Biodiversity and sustainability depend on healthy rivers, but our freshwater systems are vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, extreme weather events such as flood and drought, and land use change.

Communicating stream dynamics and the impact that urban design might have on stream health, flood and habitat conditions is crucial yet challenging. Methods to model restoration of natural functions of urban waterways are evolving, alongside improvements in producing granular site condition data using lidar and geospatial technologies. However, this granular data comes at substantial computational cost.

Stream dynamics software exist as standalone programs or integrated plugins within larger design platforms spanning GIS, BIM and visualisation. Each plugin has unique strengths and limitations. This requires flow modellers and landscape designers to have an expansive ‘domain knowledge’ to select the right tool for the job.

This project aims to conduct a comprehensive stocktake evaluating the different stream dynamics plugins used by urban designers and engineers. It will tabulate each plugin's capabilities, costs, computing needs and suitability for various data resolutions and design tasks. The assessment will also cover the capacity for modelling produced by hydraulic engineering professionals to be used by design professionals and vice-versa.

This stocktake will be used to produce a guide informing industry practitioners, researchers and educators on selecting the most appropriate tools for analysing stream interventions. This multidisciplinary resource will help practitioners leverage increasing data quality and computing power for robust yet efficient modelling and design workflows.

The stocktake will build interdisciplinary capabilities across landscape architecture, hydrological engineering and data analytics - domains converging on environmental simulation using intensive elevation and fluid dynamics data.

MDAP's expertise will be invaluable for formalising the underlying data management and computational requirements. We will collaborate with MDAP to outline testing methodologies, evaluate plugins' data handling, and produce best practice guidelines optimising software selection based on project needs.