A classification of flow continuity of stream reaches in the Murray Darling Basin within the network of the AWRA-R river systems model

This dataset contains a classification of the stream reaches in the Murray Darling Basin by flow continuity assessed as perennial / intermittent / ephemeral within the network of the AWRA-R river systems model. The classification is applied on a rolling 10-year basis from 1/1/1873 to 31/12/2020. The dataset was created for the purpose of identifying which reaches are perennial / intermittent / ephemeral and how these conditions have changed through time. \n\nThe definitions used in the flow continuity classification are:\n•\tPerennial stream has continuous flow for minimum of three out of five years (i.e. flow may cease in 2 out of 5 years)\n•\tEphemeral stream has flow events that do not exceed continuous 30 days duration in three out of five years (can have multiple short events per year)\n•\tIntermittent streams are everything else not classified as perennial or ephemeral.\n\nThe dataset contains:\n•\ta figure displaying a summary of the data as a long term average (flow_continuity_LTA.png) and another figure with the classification applied over the most recent period of 2011-2020 (flow_continuity_2011-2020.png). \n•\tA shapefile containing the location of all 519 applicable gauges with the classification results for the long term average and the most recent period (Flow_Continuity.shp). \n•\tA csv file containing the results for each of the 139 10-year periods for each gauge (Flow_Continuity_10yr_summary.csv). These results can be joined to the shapefile to display spatially suing the GaugeId field.\n•\tA polyline shapefile of the stream reaches used in the AWRA-R model of the Murray Darling Basin classified using the long term average data and the most recent 10 years. This shapefile is an interpretation of the spatial interpolation between gauges (generally the gauge is assumed representative of what the conditions are upstream). This shapefile was created to aid the visual interpretation of the differences in flow continuity between the most recent 10 years compared to the long term average, the point data at the gauge is the point of truth not this polyline shapefile.\n\nThe point shapefile contains fields for identifying the stream gauge used such as the gauge ID (GaugeId), gauge name (GaugeName) and the latitude and longitude (GDA94). The start date (StartDate) and end date (EndDate) refer the period of observation and the days of valid observations (DaysOfVali) refer to the number of days between these dates that have valid observations. There are two fields for the results of the classification for the long term average (Cont_LTA) and the most recent 10 years (Cont_11_20).\n\nThe polyline shapefile contains the river network from the AWRA-R river model, the reaches within this model are identified by ID_updated and Reach_ID. The downstream gauge for each reach is identified by the fields for the gauge ID (GaugeID) and gauge name (GaugeName). There are two fields for the results of the classification for the long term average (Cont_LTA) and the most recent 10 years (Cont_11_20).\n\nLineage: The stream flow data was downloaded from the Bureau of Meteorology (2015) for all available gauges. In some cases where a gauge had moved (with the same gauge number with a letter suffix) the records were combined into a single time series. For each year the presence of no flow days was recorded along the with the maximum number of continuous days of flow needed for the classification. Each gauge was classified according to the definitions above for the entire record and a rolling 10 year period.\n\nThe stream reaches included in the classification are from the AWRA-R model of the Murray Darling Basin (Dutta et al, 2015) with the polylines selected from GA’s 250K topographic maps. \n