The river system and water management

The Little Swanport River and its tributaries are the backbone of the catchment and their flowing water is the lifeblood. Although we know that water is essential to many activities across the catchment, this is never more obvious than when it is not available, such as during the drought in the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Although a small catchment with relatively few people compared to some of the intensely farmed and settled areas in northern Tasmania, information available on the Little Swanport River and its tributaries is comparatively abundant. This is largely a reflection of the people living in the catchment; they have been proactive in developing a community-based management plan for the catchment, in addition to the Water Management Plan developed by the Tasmanian Government. As we discussed previously, water has been a divisive issue in this catchment, and as a consequence the Tasmanian Government has conducted a number of studies on water-related matters across the catchment; these are available on the Department of Primary Industries, Parks, Water and Environment website (www.dpiw.tas.gov.au). Of particular note is the comprehensive State of Rivers Report for Little Swan port (DPIW 2006b), which clearly describes the hydrology, ecosystem values, gemnorphology, water quality and aquatic ecology of the catchment. Much of the in formation in this chapter has been summarised from this report and others produced for the holistic environmental flows project which we discuss later (DPIW 2007c).