Background

The Ayeyarwady River Basin supports globally significant biodiversity assets and ecosystem values, including being a global hotspot of freshwater fish biodiversity and endemism, and sustaining a productive fishery. These freshwater assets and values are sustained by critical flow-related ecological processes (e.g. hydrologic connectivity, primary and secondary productivity). They can also be affected by barriers to connectivity and flow alteration arising from water infrastructure developments (dams and weirs) as well as habitat degradation and water pollution brought about by land use intensification associated with human development (agriculture, urbanisation, mining, river dredging, etc).

The assessment of the ecohydrology of the Ayeyarwady Basin is an input to the Ayeyarwady State of the Basin Assessment (SOBA).

Objectives

The purpose of this ecohydrology assessment is to characterise status and trends in the ecohydrological regime of the Ayeyarwady River Basin so that concepts and information on the interconnections between water and ecosystems feature in future planning and management initiatives in the Ayeyarwady Basin.

Outcomes

This activity was undertaken by the Australian Rivers Institute (ARI) with the support of Truii. The main output from the project includes a technical paper describing the project team’s assessment of the ecohydrology of the Ayeyarwady River Basin. The report provides the best synthesis and integration of information already available from other SOBA activities.