Characterising condition for non-woody vegetation in floodplain-wetland systems.

An important part of evaluation is understanding ‘what is good’. Defining what is ‘good’ requires understanding what environmental water management is aiming to achieve and why – for example, the objectives, and the functions and values supported, as well as how outcomes will be assessed, such as condition, resilience or thresholds to evaluate ‘success’ against. This research explored the notion of ‘success’ and ‘what is good’ and aimed to rethink the way condition is used to envisage, evaluate and communicate non-woody vegetation outcomes from environmental flows. The resulting structured framework for characterising condition, using both ecological data and societal values, provides practical guidance for water managers to inform condition benchmarks, watering objectives and choice of monitoring metrics. Outcomes have fed into the Flow-MER evaluation of vegetation and are more broadly applicable to monitoring and evaluation of non-woody vegetation outcomes from environmental watering or other management activities.