Image of the Day: Macquarie Marshes at Quambone Station, NSW Australia
The Macquarie Marshes – a vast, tangled sprawl of creeks and swamps between Nyngan and Walgett in the state’s northwest – has declined by about half since the 1960s because of the drought and the diversion of water for irrigation. … ”About 50 per cent of the wetland area is gone and more has been subjected to systematic degradation,” said Professor Richard Kingsford, the director of the wetlands centre. The hope is that up to 200 megalitres bought back by the federal and state governments will help rejuvenate sections of the marsh, but those environmental flows won’t be delivered until enough rain falls upstream. ”The 200 megalitres will make a difference, but the general picture is one of decline and the marshes will never be what they used to be,” Professor Kingsford said.
Macquarie Marshes – Quambone Station NSW / Drought and ‘systematic degradation’ doom wetlands in New South Wales
This is absolute rubbish. The loss of marsh area that Kingsford refers to happened prior to the building of Burrendong Dam and during one of the wettest phases the marshes has seen during the past 120 years. The culprit was intensive grazing and burning of reedbeds in this fragile ephemeral environment. The environment has an allocation of some 160,000 megalitres and the Governments have lately purchased a further 103,000 megalitres with another 43,000 megalitres comming from infrastructure improvements. The environment now gets 82% of all flows in the Macquarie Valley.
if you graze any counrty that hard it will degrade. How could all that vegetation in the picture disappear, it has not just turned to mulch. Overgrazing is a major problem for the marshes. Kingsford is devious never to mention the perils of overgrazing