Regulated and unregulated stream reaches in the Murray Darling Basin within the network of the AWRA-R river systems model

Brief description

This dataset contains a classification of the stream reaches in the Murray Darling Basin as either regulated or unregulated within the network of the AWRA-R river systems model. The dataset was created for the purposes of identifying which reaches are potentially impacted by river regulation and could potentially be capable of receiving environmental water releases from storages. The definition of a regulated reach that has been adopted here is simply being downstream of a major storage. This is a much more inclusive definition of regulated than is adopted for water resources applications: “River on which a licensed entitlement regime exists with centralised allocation, and from which orders may be placed for upstream release of a licensed allocation” (http://www.bom.gov.au/water/awid/id-996.shtml).

The dataset contains a figure displaying the data (reg_unreg.png), the major storages dataset (MDB_reservoirs_250K.shp) and a shapefile for the stream reaches (AWRA-Rv5_MDB_streams_reg_unreg.shp). The stream reaches shapefile has Reach ID and ID_updated fields as used in AWRA-R, there are also fields for GaugeID and GaugeName which are the downstream gauge number and name and a regulation field that contains the classification as either Regulated or Unregulated.

Lineage: The major storages were selected as those that are the main sources for irrigation and environmental water, small weirs and town water supplies have not been included. The dataset is composed of the 32 storages that have storage volumes regularly updated by the MDBA (https://www.mdba.gov.au/water-management/murray-darling-reports-data/water-in-storages), the 3 on-stream storages in the Wimmera Catchment that are used for environmental releases (https://www.vewh.vic.gov.au/rivers-and-wetlands/western-region/wimmera-system) and 10 other storages that have been incorporated into AWRA-R. The outline of these 45 storages is from the polygons from GA’s 250K topographic maps.

The stream reaches included in the classification are from the AWRA-R model of the Murray Darling Basin (Dutta et al, 2015) with the polylines selected from GA’s 250K topographic maps. The classification of regulated or unregulated was done manually for each stream reach.