Security and Sustainability

The Water Research Centre has built a team of experts with a strong track record in achieving water security and sustainability outcomes for all types of water resources. This is becoming increasingly important in a world where human populations are rapidly growing and climate change is accelerating.

What is secure and sustainable water?

Secure and sustainable water describes a situation where a nation is water self-sufficient; that is, it is managed so that it meets the needs of industries, people and the environment. Secure and sustainable water is an important goal of many countries, including Australia.

Our expertise
All water resource types: Groundwater, surface water, marine, estuarine, treated wastewater

Blue carbon system science and restoration

Environmental monitoring using:
Remote sensing – thermal and hyperspectral imaging using satellites

Proximal sensing and IoT solutions

Geochemistry to trace pathways of water, nutrient pollution, recharge and more

Water chemistry and soil microbiology

Stream mesocosm facility at the Waite Campus and advanced water quality sensor network

Guidelines for management, such as for lakes and reservoirs to minimise the risk of algal blooms

Risk analysis, uncertainty and system resilience, with strengths in:
Intersection of water and climate, such as how land processes influence the regional climate

Climate extremes, climate change, flood, drought and fire in dryland environments

Forecasting solar energy needs, water demand, and more

Climate variability and change

Ecosystem services

Large-scale changes and planning

Anthropogenic intertidal ecology maintenance
Research areas
Climate and natural disasters: Flood and drought estimation and prediction, risk assessment and scenario-based decision making, climate change, climate impact assessment, resilience engineering, land use planning, adaptation, mitigation, blue carbon

Environment: Water quality, environmental flows, aquatic ecology, water footprints

Security: Resource planning and assessments, dams planning and assessments, managing and monitoring water quality
Highlighted researchers

Professor Megan Lewis

Professor Megan Lewis leads the Spatial Sciences Group, and from 2017 to 2019 was head of the School of Biological Sciences. She is an expert in Earth observation using remote sensing, and is our go-to expert on analysing landscape composition and variation in the contexts of Australian arid and semi-arid environments, native vegetation, wetlands and agriculture.

Professor Justin Brookes

Professor Justin Brookes is part of the School of Biological Sciences.His major focus of research is water quality for potable supply and river and lake ecology. He leads several large inter-institutional projects examining degradation of chemical contaminants of concern, carbon cycling in lakes and rivers, and the ecology of the Coorong and Lower Lakes of the River Murray.

Professor Timothy Cavagnaro

Professor Timothy Cavagnaro is at the School of Agriculture, Food and Wine. His expertise is microbial ecology; the living things in soils, which can tell us about phenomena like leaching, run off and nutrient cycling. He advocates for non-farm management practices like carbon sequestration that are tied with co-benefits. His work often also includes remote sensing and economic analysis.

Professor Holger Maier

Professor Holger Maier is part of the School of Civil, Environmental and Mining Engineering. He develops techniques to sustainably manage water resources and engineering infrastructure, with a particular focus on the water-energy nexus. He is skilled in machine learning and hybrid process/data driven models, and in techniques for optimisation and decision support in uncertain settings.

Associate Professor Luke Mosley

Associate Professor Luke Mosley is the manager of the Water Research Centre and a research fellow at the School of Biological Sciences. He specialises in the chemistry of water, from rivers to estuaries to oceans, and on sediment-water interactions such as acid sulfate soils. He consults to the state government on new initiatives like the Blue Carbon Strategy for SA.

Dr Ramesh Raja Segaran

Dr Ramesh Raja Segaran is director of the Uncrewed Research Aircraft Facility. He is an expert in GIS, modelling, and remote sensing from satellite imagery and aerial photography. He and his team are skilled at monitoring and modelling freshwater systems with satellite imagery, including working with very high resolution imagery, and integrating it with other data, such as fish genetic diversity.

Dr Jonathan Tyler

Dr Jonathan Tyler is an earth scientist at the School of Physical Sciences.He uses isotope geochemistry to study the history of climate change, focusing on the past 2000 years to develop datasets relevant to today’s climate issues. He also uses stable isotopes to trace water pathways, such as to track nutrient pollution in the Coorong.

Dr Matthew Knowling

Dr Matthew Knowling is part of the School of Civil, Environmental and Mining Engineering. He specialises in groundwater, geothermal and economic modelling to support decision-making, primarily with complex and computationally heavy models. He is now focusing on agtech research.

Dr Michael Leonard

Dr Michael Leonard is at the School of Civil, Environmental and Mining Engineering. He applies numerical and statistical modelling to environmental engineering problems, such as flooding from complex man-made or natural systems. His goal is to develop methods for improved assessment of flood risk.

Dr Anjana Devanand

Dr Anjana Devanand is at the School of Civil, Environmental and Mining Engineering. She is an expert in stochastic modeling to understand the climate risk on water resource and environmental systems. She focuses on the intersection of water and climate to understand how land processes influence the regional climate, and using models to perform experiments to understand the feedback of land processes to the system as a whole.