DBCA's Biodiversity and Conservation Science division has a key role in monitoring, evaluating and reporting on the environmental health of the Swan Canning Estuary and its catchment. 

Environmental monitoring is focused on water quality, biological indicators (fish communities and seagrass) and contaminants (including plastic). 

Monitoring is important. It enables DBCA to:

• monitor the extent and severity of low oxygen and algal blooms
• identify changing conditions and inform the community if risks occur
• guide management decisions and incident response
• track trends, measure compliance and determine the effectiveness of estuary and catchment management measures
• inform and improve estuarine and catchment models
• understand the condition of key assets

Fish communities in the Swan Canning Riverpark 

Fish communities exhibit predictable responses to ecosystem degradation and therefore may be used as sensitive indicators of the ecological condition of these systems. Biotic indices, based on fish and other biological communities, are now used worldwide to quantify the ecological health of rivers, lakes, estuaries and many other environments. 

A Fish Community Index (FCI) for the Swan Canning Estuary was developed by Murdoch University over five years (2007-2012) in collaboration with the Swan River Trust, the Department of Water and the Department of Fisheries. The FCI, which was developed from a 30-year dataset, is the first of its kind for assessing estuarine health in Australia and has been subjected to extensive testing, validation and review to provide a robust and sensitive tool for monitoring and reporting. The FCI complements traditional water quality testing as a measure of the condition of the system and since 2012 has been part of regular monitoring and reporting on the waterway. 

Routine fish community monitoring 

DBCA partners with Murdoch University to undertake annual evaluations of the fish communities in the Swan Canning Estuary for the purposes of applying the FCI and reporting on the estuarine condition. The FCI combines signals from numerous characteristics of the fish community such as abundance, diversity and species identity, and the relative proportions of species with different feeding and habitat requirements. The resulting index score (0-100) quantifies the ecological health of the Swan Canning Estuary and results are reported as A (very good) to E (very poor). 

Reports are produced annually, with the most recent report available below and previous reports available from the DBCA library.