CQU researcher Claire Sellens has resorted to digging into sediment if a stream bed is dry, in her quest to sample water courses in the Fitzroy Basin.

 "I hope it rains soon," she says, as it has been very dry since she arrived in the region in September last year.  

The Post-Doctoral Research Fellow is currently focussed on streams in the Dawson River catchment. Closer to home she has been studying Nankin Creek near Emu Park, looking at use of the dry stream bed as a refuge for macroinvertebrates during the dry phase. She is about to expand this work to look at more local creeks in the Byfield, Yeppoon, and Farnborough areas.  

"I am collecting samples from pools if there is water, and digging into the sediment if the stream bed is dry," she says.  

Claire Sellens

Ms Sellens is currently working with Dr Leo Duivenvoorden, looking at the diversity of macroinvertebrates in water bodies on the Dawson Mine.

"We have already collected samples while streams were running, and we will shortly be looking to see what is present at these sites during the dry phase.  

"I am also setting up a project to look at the effect of historic and current gold mining activity on the streams around Cracow in South East Queensland.  

"Presently, I am also collating data to evaluate reference streams in Central Queensland with the purpose of developing local reference conditions (benchmarks) for the assessment of stream condition.

"I hope to develop predictive models for ephemeral streams, and also develop alternative benchmarks for modified landscapes. These will be tools that will address the limitations of the need to identify undisturbed streams, and also the natural changes that occur in species distribution during wet and dry phases of stream ecology. The predictive models can then be used to assess the health of streams in the central Queensland region," Ms Sellens says.  

The researcher is attached to the Centre for Environmental Management and is based at CQU Rockhampton, where she came with her husband John McGrath, who is doing post-doctoral studies at the Capricornia Centre for Mucosal Immunology.

She confesses a love for "mucking around in streams" as a kid.

"We lived in country Victoria. One of my earliest memories was fishing with my cousins in the red-gum floodplains of the Murray River. We could always catch carp and red fin, some of them almost as big as us. It wasn't until uni that I gained some awareness of the implications of human impact on the condition of rivers, and I spent my honours year comparing the breakdown of willow and eucalyptus leaves in a sand-slugged stream.

"I really began my career in freshwater ecology because I could manoeuvre a kayak. After graduation from Monash University I worked with a team from the Cooperative Research Centre for Freshwater Ecology (CRCFE) and Melbourne Water looking at the sources of pollution in the Yarra River in Melbourne. For about  3  months over summer, we spent each day kayaking and boating up and down the Yarra River collecting bug samples. I thought this was the dream job.

 "A few months later I reconsidered my position, when we were back in the lab processing the hundreds of samples, and I was spending too much time looking at worm setae and mayfly legs. About this time I heard about the Rapid Bioassessment Approach. This involves a standardised sampling method, and identification of biota to family level. I thought that I better educate myself in this approach if I didn't want to spend the rest of my career elucidating the structure of worm hairs.

"In 2000 I moved up to Canberra to start working on my PhD under the supervision of Richard Norris and Bruce Chessman, (leaders in the development of rapid bioassessment techniques in Australia). My project investigated good management practice for urban and agricultural impacts on river ecology and how you could set benchmarks for river health in these types of environments. One of the main reasons for this project was that there are so few minimally disturbed rivers left on which to base a benchmark for healthy rivers.

"I was able to collect  2  seasons of data before drought occurred across my study area. Accordingly I modified the project to look at how drought conditions affect benchmarks, and predictive modelling accuracy. This time I was only able to collect one season of data before bushfires spread across half of my catchments. Again I modified the project to look at the effect of bushfire.

"During 2002 I had the opportunity to work on a documentary series  ' Wild Rivers' . The series looked at the pristine rivers in Victoria, the ACT, and the Northern Territory, and we discussed the different impacts affecting rivers and ways of minimising the effect of human activity. It was hoped that the wild rivers program helps raise awareness in the community about how important it is to protect and maintain the condition of the remaining wild rivers of Australia." 
Prior to moving up to Central Queensland,  Ms Sellens  took a job with the EPA in Canberra.

"For  2  days a week I was seconded to the University where I worked on some really innovative projects: one project involved sophisticated use of satellite and aerial photography to determine impervious areas in urban environments - which can be critical to managing urban impacts. The second project involved inferential uncertainty and developing and testing software using the Multiple Lines of Evidence approach. The rest of the time, I was involved in reviewing and developing environmental flow guidelines for the ACT. 

"While I am at CQU I am keen to develop methods for assessing the condition of ephemeral streams. Initially this will involve understanding the ecology of streams during the different stages of drying (wet, horizontal disconnection, vertical disconnection, rewetting). Since there hasn't been a rainy season up here for a couple of years I am starting the project at the dry stage. So at the moment I am coming to terms with being a terrestrial aquatic ecologist, and I am busy looking for eggs and seeds in the dry stream beds, and testing methods for collecting and processing samples. "