Project Dams

Case study sites 

Monitoring sites have been established across 4 geographic areas within Victoria, Australia (Figure 1): 4 dams South of Ballarat, 3 dams West of Bendigo, 1 dam south of Leongatha, and 4 dams West of Wangaratta. The selection of dams was based on a mix of considerations around cooperating land owners and ease of access, advice from the partner farming groups (Southern Farming Systems,  Birchip Cropping Group, Riverine Plains and Food and Fibre Gippsland), and relatively idealistic conditions including land use that was relatively stable across the monitoring period, no groundwater contributions and off waterways. All dams were located within catchments used for grazing or cropping, with some lightly or partially timbered.

Monitoring arrangements

The monitoring at each farm dam consists of a fully automatic weather station, water level sensor, a soil moisture probe, along with RTU and data logger with solar charging. Details of the monitoring instruments are outlined in Table 1 with a typical farm dam and installation shown in Figure 1. Where the dam is subject to cattle or sheep access, fencing has been provided for protection. Where the catchment is subject to cropping, all cabling has been buried and sensors placed on fencelines or out of the way of farm machinery.

Table 1: Details of monitoring equipment.

Catchment Characterisation

Soil characterisation was undertaken for each catchment to help inform the rainfall-runoff relationships derived for each catchment. Soil profiles were described for the upper, middle and lower sections of each dam catchment according to the Australian standard methodsm (National Committee on Soil and Terrain 2009), and included profile descriptions for each soil series in the catchment if more than one was present. The descriptions included physical and chemical properties required for hydropedological characterisation, including infiltration testing using ring infiltrometers. The data is used to characterise the soil hydrology (infiltration, throughflow and interflow) in each catchment. Terrain and physiographic characteristics were derived from high resolution digital elevation models derived from the available Lidar survey data.