As part of Murray-Darling Basin Plan obligations, each Basin State must develop long-term watering plans (LTWPs) that sit within the Basin Plan environmental water planning framework. These documents must be consistent with the Basin-wide Environmental Watering Strategy.

Alluvium produced the LTWP for northern Victoria which forms a key document to guide the development of annual watering priorities for each water resource plan area, which in turn inform the development of Basin annual environmental watering priorities.

All available ecological objectives and documents for environmental watering sites (assets) and ecosystem functions were reviewed and collated. This included detail of assets that the objectives and targets are aligned with. The information was used to identify which criteria each asset meet so that priority assets and functions could be clearly identified in the plan.

Existing conceptual models were also identified to illustrate the dependency of the ecological objectives on environmental water. Secondly, GIS maps were produced to accurately represent the distribution of grouped ecological objectives at different appropriate scales across each of Victoria’s three water resource plan areas.

Targets for the LTWP were then produced as a means of quantifying the progress towards achieving the objectives. A process was also developed to describe the principals, process and criteria in order to optimise watering actions for landscape scale outcomes. This included a description of the principals, process and criteria for the development of a multisite watering plan.