A new river system modelling tool for sustainable operational management of water resources.

The eWater Cooperative Research Centre of Australia has developed a river system modelling software called eWater Source that can be used to assist water managers and river operators in planning and operating river systems. It has been designed and developed within Australia to provide a consistent approach to underpin a wide range of water planning and management purposes. The software provides tools for the prediction and quantification of water from catchments to the end of a river system by integrating continuous rainfall-runoff and river system models. It includes three modes (catchment runoff, river management and river operations) for different applications. This paper introduces the operations mode of Source and compares its functionality with the existing tools used for daily river operations in Australia, with the Goulburn River as the case study. A 5-year period is used to compare modelled and observed results. Forecasts from Source and the existing tools are compared to observations over 7-day forecast periods that include an environmental water release. Source provided acceptable or improved results and required less user input than the existing method. Source provides a flexible software tool in which various forecast models can be incorporated. The application has demonstrated the potential of Source to provide an improvement on the existing river operations models in Australia at both the daily and seasonal time steps.

Discrimination of the hard keratins animal horn and chelonian shell using attenuated total reflection-infrared spectroscopy.

The ability to discriminate between objects manufactured from animal horn and chelonian (turtle, tortoise, or terrapin) shell is important from a cultural and archeological perspective such that it may allow conservators to determine the appropriate treatment and long-term care solution. It would also aid curators in identifying and cataloging items manufactured from these materials. Discrimination and classification is also a valuable tool for those involved in tracking the illegal trade in restricted materials of this nature. Attenuated total reflection infrared (ATR-IR) spectroscopy, using a single reflection diamond internal reflection element (IRE), coupled with discrimination analysis was used to analyze a total of thirty-nine samples (29 calibration samples, 10 validation samples). A discrimination analysis model was constructed using Mahalanobis distances to classify spectra into one of two classes. The model was then subsequently used to successfully classify all validation samples and correctly identify them as animal horn or chelonian shell based on second-derivative spectra of the amide I and II regions. This technique requires minimal to no sample preparation and may be used to nondestructively identify very small samples successfully without performing detailed secondary structural curve-fitting routines. This model should be a valuable resource to museums, conservators, and wildlife management programs for rapidly and reliably discriminating between animal horn and chelonian shell.