Mackay-Whitsunday coast aerial view. PHOTO SOURCE:  Matt Bloor

Regional River Facts

The region covers an area of approximately 9000km² in the Central Queensland coast.

The major rivers of the Mackay Whitsunday Region include the Pioneer, O’Connell/Andromache and Proserpine.
A number of small streams discharge directly to the Great Barrier Reef Lagoon and Coral Sea. The region contains three of the top 10 high risk catchments identified in the Reef Water Quality Protection Plan which aims to address diffuse pollution from broad scale land use, particularly sediments and nutrients which impact upon the inner reefs and seagrass areas of the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area.

Land uses in the region which have an influence on water quality and typically follow these trends within the catchment :

• Natural bushlands in the headwaters,
• Beef grazing in the mid course,
• Sugarcane and urban areas influence the lower floodplain and coastal areas.

Healthy Waterways Program

Two systems of natural resource management information collection and management response are integrated to deliver Healthy Waterways across the Mackay-Whitsunday Region and to the Great Barrier Reef Lagoon.

Our Water Quality Improvement Plan sets catchment-level management strategies which direct the improvements in the water quality of freshwater and marine systems in the Mackay-Whitsunday region.

Facilitated by the Mackay Whitsunday regional group, the regional Healthy Waterways Working Group coordinates this work and consults with the community to make management planning decisions using the science data collected from our region-wide, Integrated Monitoring Program and other knowledge sources. By consulting with Catchment Reference Panels, the community’s values and uses for waterways can be understood and used to set the resource condition targets which direct regional Water Quality Improvement Plan strategies.

The Integrated Monitoring Program assesses waterways issues and measures change in the condition of water resources through ambient (daily), event-based (flood) and community-based (volunteer) waterways monitoring. The monitoring program enables the group to track the level of effectiveness by which land managers are achieving resource condition targets set by the Water Quality Improvement Plan.

The Sustainable Landscapes incentive scheme enables best practice land management to be implemented at the individual, industry and public land management scales whilst the Integrated Monitoring Program enables the effectiveness of this change in land management practice to be measured in terms of water resource condition.