1.3.2.2 Gaps

No additional economic assets were nominated following the Galilee asset workshops in Longreach and Richmond in September 2014.

Two additional sets of potential assets were proposed at the workshop in Brisbane in October 2014, but they were considered of lower priority than other datasets already nominated by Queensland state agencies and thus these two datasets were not pursued to formal nomination for assets.

These sets of potential assets are from the Queensland Department of Environment and Heritage Protection, which holds the database for Aquatic Conservation Assessments (ACA) and for the Aquatic Biodiversity Assessment Mapping Method (AquaBAMM) (DEHP, 2015).

ACAs are non-social and non-economic assessments that are designed with the sole intent of identifying conservation values of wetlands at any user-defined scale. The ACA database contains a set of ‘special features’ that are places of hydrological, ecological and/or sociocultural locations that are not necessarily identified as wetlands or conservation places by other means. These features are a potential set of assets that are qualitatively different to any existing asset dataset contributed to the Galilee asset list during the current assessment of water dependence.

AquaBAMM identifies relative wetland conservation values within a specified area – usually a catchment – using criteria, indicators and measures that are based on a large body literature. The AquaBAMM process identified species of local significance which could be potential assets. Such species are not necessarily on national or state lists of threatened species, but are threatened in a specific catchment.