Freshwater science at the landscape scale relies heavily on large data streams. In Australia, the Geofabric National Catchment Boundaries database pushed Australian water research to the forefront of spatial ecohydrology globally by providing the ability to map the environmental characteristics of rivers and catchments.
In this talk we present several new data products and corresponding modeling applications and frameworks:
The first data product is the HydroATLAS (Linke et al 2019) and its corresponding equivalent, the LakeATLAS (Lehner et al 2022) which aggregated ~250 variables to 1 million subcatchments, 8 million stream segments and 1.4 million lakes globally in one hydrologically connected framework. We illustrate the HydroATLAS framework using a current ARC funded project on modeling nutrient runoff to lakes globally.
The second framework is an integrated species distribution modeling workbench. Based on environmental background data from both the Geofabric and the HydroATLAS, we designed an interface that automatically connects to biodiversity databases such as the Atlas of Living Australia or GBIF and runs ensemble species distribution models that can then be extrapolated to the landscape.
Last, while the Geofabric is heavily used, it is now almost 20 years outdated. We present a prototype upgrade of the National Catchment Database to the much finer scale Geofabric V3.2, as well as a roadmap to a completely updated database that can also be used for other spatial frameworks.