Eco-servicing South Creek catchment : a case study from Australia's largest urban growth precincts

Assessing the health of catchments and creeks is often underpinned by application of water quality guidelines. Monitoring programs in New South Wales traditionally compare results to default ANZECC water quality guidelines are based on wide geographic areas and do not cater for localised conditions or include an assessment of biota. We outline an alternate framework for assessing catchment health by combining ecosystem services, community values and iconic species and ecological communities. The focus for this study is South Creek catchment which is Sydney’s largest urban freshwater stream and by 2031 will be home to an additional one million residents. To accommodate this growth the landscape and ecosystems will be drastically modified. In this study we explore opportunities to manage the South Creek catchment to maintain liveability values and ecosystem services for future communities through the use of iconic species. We suggest a locally based iconic species can provide a framework and serve as ecological indicators to assess future ecosystem and development scenarios. By following the steps outlined in this paper, catchment managers can develop their own locally based framework grounded on community and catchment specific metrics incorporating iconic species. This approach will provide multiple lines of evidence to identify catchment pressures and responses over time which will provide a more complete picture of catchment health than the use of water quality guidelines alone.