The long-awaited Catchment Rehydration Selection Tool (CReST) was officially launched at the Mulloon Rehydration Conference in May 2024.

The CReST model is designed to prioritise catchments across NSW, offering high-level guidance for selecting agricultural areas for potential landscape rehydration infrastructure and practices at the catchment scale.

Focusing on the suitability of infrastructure within watercourses (such as leaky weirs) and riparian zones (such as revegetation), the CReST model highlights the potential agricultural and environmental benefits of these rehydration practices.

CReST has been developed in partnership with HydroTerra, with valuable input from JB Pacific.

Developing CReST included:

identifying and prioritising criteria for landscape rehydration (by 50 experts in the academic and natural resource management sectors)
analysing data sets to create data behind CReST model and online portal (by JB Pacific)
developing a roadmap for optimising large-scale adoption of landscape rehydration across NSW.

Intended users

It is expected that CReST will be used by government agencies, regulators, industry, farming communities, natural resource managers and private organisations.

Landscape Rehydration:

The process of restoring the natural movement of water through rural landscapes.

NSW Department of Planning and Environment, 2023

Future

This initial iteration of CReST is expected to be dynamic. Ground-truthing and validation efforts will be undertaken with changes to modelled rankings anticipated in the future. As improved spatial datasets become accessible they may also be incorporated.

Where further field validation and refinement is needed, additional grant and philanthropic funding will be sought to support its testing and expansion into a national tool.