Completed 2021 Southern Stuart Corridor

The Southern Stuart Corridor project focused on 4 water management areas in the Northern Territory: Tennant Creek, Western Davenport, Ti Tree Basin and Alice Springs.

These areas in the southern half of the Northern Territory lie close to the Stuart Highway, and represent areas where the Northern Territory Government has identified a need for improved water resource management. Outside of these water management areas, the Southern Stuart Corridor project also investigated potential groundwater supplies for several remote communities.

Water allocation planning and agricultural expansion in the Southern Stuart Corridor is currently hampered by limited information about the character and extent of groundwater resources and groundwater systems more generally, including recharge rates, groundwatersurface water connectivity, and the dependency of vegetation communities on groundwater.

Benefits

The project provided baseline data to inform groundwater prospectivity analysis, support the development of holistic water and salinity management strategies and inform water allocations.

Achievements

The main achievements of this project include:

• an improved understanding of regional groundwater systems and processes, including the geology, basin architecture, surface water  groundwater interaction, inter-aquifer leakage, basin  paleovalley connectivity and potential groundwater dependence of vegetation
• assessments of the location, quantity and quality of groundwater resources to underpin agricultural expansion and Alice Springs future water supply
• identification of potential new groundwater resources to provide enhanced water security for remote communities
• target identification of potential managed aquifer recharge areas, which could offset existing and potential future groundwater development.