Lori Gould

18 Aug Lori Gould

Lori Gould, Australia

Lori Gould is Principal of an environmental consulting business – GrassRoots Environmental which specialises in natural resource management, particularly riparian rehabilitation and community engagement. In her spare time she works at Jerrabomberra Wetlands in the ACT as Program Manager for Science and Community Engagement. Prior to this Lori was a Senior Project Manager for 15 years with Greening Australia, specialising in riparian and catchment management programs to improve water quality and biodiversity in rural Australia and before this a Park Ranger with ACT Parks and Conservation Service for 6 years. Lori holds a Master’s Degree in Integrated Water Management, a Post Graduate Certificate in River Restoration and Management, an Environmental Science Degree and Associate Diploma in Animal Science. Lori is also a Fellow of the Peter Cullen Trust.

Presentation Title: RoCing RARC (Rivers of Carbon and Rapid Assessment of Riparian Condition)

RoCing RARC is the culmination of a large body of work over ten years to tackle the perplexing question about how to monitor outcomes of riparian rehabilitation projects. In 2005, a monitoring program was launched for a large scale riparian rehabilitation program in the Lachlan Catchment (Boorowa River Recovery), which compared 20 project sites with 20 control sites for a range of indicators looking at biodiversity, habitat and water quality for five different works types. This lasted for eight years and was analysed in partnership with researchers managing the Australian Riparian Experiment. The findings demonstrated changes for a number of indicators and constancy for others which were likely to change over a longer time frame. Although very useful, this monitoring program cost more than $80 000. As there were a large number of project sites and more being signed up every week through the Rivers of Carbon (RoC) project, there was a desire to come up with a monitoring program that was quick and easy and could be undertaken for all sites. Rapid Assessment of Riparian Condition (RARC) (developed by Amy Jansen et.al.) had been around for many years and was being used by a number of community groups. It is simple, quick, based on science, and appeared to be suitable for the RoC program. To test the usefulness of this method for the RoC project, a RARC assessment was carried out at all 40 Boorowa River Recovery sites at the same time as the detailed monitoring program was carried out. The results for the two methodologies were compared and found to align well. RARC has since been used for all RoC sites An analysis of RoC RARC data is being carried out over June and the results will be available in time for River Symposium 2017.