Ross River virus (RRV) is the most common mosquitoborne disease notified within Australia and is a significant public health issue for NSW. There have been more than 7500 notifications of RRV in NSW over the past 10 years. Peak seasons occurred in 1996–97 (1547 notified cases) and 2005–06 (1268 notified cases), with an average of 683 notifications for the 11 seasons before this.1 The November 2...

Ross River virus is a common mosquito-borne arbovirus responsible for outbreaks of polyarthritic disease throughout Australia. To better understand climatic factors preceding outbreaks, we compared seasonal and monthly rainfall and temperature trends in outbreak and nonoutbreak years at four epidemic-prone locations. Our analyses showed that rainfall in outbreak years tended to be above average...

The hydrological model WASA (Model of Water Availability in Semi-Arid Environments) has been developed as a deterministic, spatially distributed model, consisting of conceptual, process-based approaches, to quantify water availability in large semi-arid regions. Water availability can be calculated with a daily resolution and on different spatial levels. The model has been applied by Güntner (2...

At the beginning of this work, it became clear that databases spanning a wide range of scales would be needed to properly test various hypotheses of scale-invariance for river networks. However, the question of what range of scales is required for these tests (and for the concept of scale-invariance to be meaningful) does not have a clear-cut answer. In the eld of critical phenomena, where scal...

Conservation programs often focus on select species, leading to management plans based on the autecology of the focal species, but multiple ecosystem components can be affected both by the environmental factors impacting, and the management targeting, focal species. These broader effects can have indirect impacts on target species through the web of interactions within ecosystems. For example, ...

Floodplain sedimentation removes particles from fluvial transport and constructs stratigraphic records of flooding, biogeochemical sequestration and other aspects of the environmental history of river basins—insight that is enhanced by accurate geochronology. The natural fallout radionuclide 210Pb, often employed to date lacustrine and marine sediments, has previously been used to determine flo...

Inputs of fresh water and grazing both can control aquatic food webs, but little is known about the relative strengths of and interactions between these controls. We use long-term data on the food web of the freshwater Hudson River estuary to investigate the importance of, and interactions between, inputs of fresh water and grazing by the invasive zebra mussel (Dreissena polymorpha). Both fresh...

Large rivers are commonly regulated by damming, yet the effects of such disruption on prokaryotic communities have seldom been studied. We describe the effects of the three large reservoirs of the Ebro River (NE Iberian Peninsula) on bacterioplankton assemblages by comparing several sites located before and after the impoundments on three occasions. We monitored the abundances of several bacter...

Contents 1. Introduction 1.1. Dynamical water quality models 1.2. Types of dynamical water quality models 1.3. Levels of model complexity 1.4. Representation of spatial structure 2. Overview of water quality models for the catchment scale 3. Ecohydrological model SWIM – a short description 4. Selected SWIM applications in the Elbe basin 4.1. Case study basin and subbasins 4.2. Model calibration...