Finally! – A wet year for our wetland restoration sites

Finally! – A wet year for our wetland restoration sites

It has been a long-time coming, but finally over much of the region people are saying “this is what a wet year looks like”, or “it reminds me of the 80s or early 90s”.

My first visit to the region was in 1996 and there was water everywhere, but at the time I was told it was nothing unusual. Twenty years later, and people have been saying ever since that the last “real” wet year was 1996 – that is, until now.

Mosquito Creek is running a banker and Bool Lagoon is full, the Wannon Falls are raging, and the Glenelg is spilling over floodplains. Dams and wetlands are full or filling across much of the region (but I might also add, not everywhere).

For wetland people like those of us as NGT – this is a pretty exciting time to be alive!

This is what the widespread rainfall of the past week, that really got things moving, looks like on a map:

weekly-rainfall-to-13th-september-2016

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be able to provide some updates on a few key wetlands we’ve been working to restore over recent years, to let you know how they have responded to the big wet.

First up – a glance at the structure at Nobles Rocks in Long Swamp.

The Long Swamp Restoration Trial Structure at Nobles Rocks - 10th September 2016

The Long Swamp Restoration Trial Structure at Nobles Rocks – 10th September 2016

The structure is working perfectly and the finished level is just about spot on, with only a slight trickle going over the top and out to the sea as a result of the recent heavy rain. This means the majority of the recent rainfall is being retained in the wetland and is slowly flowing towards downstream wetlands in Long Swamp, before entering the Glenelg River via Oxbow Lake. It will be a very interesting round of monitoring coming up, as we chart the ecological response of flora and fauna to the restored habitat and flows.

Mark Bachmann