Marine Coasts and Estuaries

The Modelling and Monitoring Assessment Decision Support System is designed to help select and review water assessments for coastal water impacts. The DSS is designed for state government officers involved with Environmental Impact Assessment. They may have science backgrounds but may not be familiar with water quality monitoring and modelling.

Some Features of the DSS:

• A process for narrowing down or reviewing assessments using predictive modelling approaches and monitoring and experimentation methods.
  Expert knowledge about the use and limitations of modelling approaches and monitoring and experimentation methods.
• Key documents in searchable help system format. The DSS draws on work done by the Coastal CRC such as OzCoast and OzEstuaries websites as well as associated Water Quality Guidelines.
• A focus on examining techniques based on:
  1. Environmental Stressors
  2. Environmental Indicators
  3. Environmental Processes
• Software search tool - the DSS provides a search tool to find existing simulation software classified under 25 sub-categories of Hydrodynamic, Process and Non-Process modelling approaches.
  • Hydrodynamic modelling approaches include: Box models (single or multiple) plus inverse exchange techniques; 1-dimensional vertical; 1-dimensional horizontal; 2-dimensional vertical;
    2-dimensional horizontal; 3-dimensional.
  • Process-based water quality models: Simple transport; Sediment transport; Sediment-Water column interaction; DO (Dissolved Oxygen); NPZ (nutrient-phytoplankton-zooplankton); CNPZ (NPZ plus carbon); NPZM (NPZ plus macrophytes); Contaminant; Pathogen; Phytoplankton (Population); Population; Foodweb.
  • Non process-based water quality models: Agent-based; Empirical relationship; Inverse nutrient; Bayesian belief network; Fuzzy logic; Artificial neural network.