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Client: Department of  Sustainability and Environment

Regional River Health Strategies (RRHS) were required to be developed under the Victorian River Health Strategy (2002). RRHS’s are strategic documents which provide state and federal agencies with targeted strategies for investment. The nine Catchment Management Authorities (CMA) and Melbourne Water in Victoria were required to develop RRHSs.

The development of these strategies was underpinned by a database of aquatic assets and information on their environmental, social and economic values and threats, known as RiVERS. In 2007 a review was undertaken of the RRHSs and resulted in the development of a conceptual framework for a new database and risk assessment tool to be built called AVIRA (Aquatic Value Identification and Risk Assessment).

The prototype AVIRA application was incrementally developed over a period of years. In 2011, the River and Wetland Health branch within the Sustainable Water Environments Water Division in DSE, Victoria engaged Spatial Vision to transform the existing AVIRA prototype into a fully functional production application. Spatial Vision worked closely with DSE to document a detailed System Design Specification which formed the basis for development.

In February 2012, the AVIRA application was launched for use by CMAs. The application enables users to load data related to the threats and values concerned with aquatic assets, undertake risk assessment, query data based on a range of parameters and then display the results in a map view. Functionality also includes the ability to symbolise data based on value and threat scores and export both spatial and textual data for offline analysis or for usage in reports. AVIRA Manager, Andrea White says the AVIRA prototype has been vastly improved to create the production version of AVIRA. AVIRA will provide a powerful data management and risk assessment tool for CMAs and a key input to their regional waterway strategies.