Merri Creek Catchment Essay

Physical description of the Merri Creek catchment:

Merri Creek catchment covers around 39,000 hectares and it is located north of Melbourne. The creek begins at the bottom of the Great Dividing Range near a small town named Heathcote Junction. It flows for approximately 60-70km south towards Port Philip Bay before it meets with Yarra River at Dights Falls in Abbotsford. The Merri Creek is one of the major offshoots for the Yarra draining water from a catchment. In the catchment, there are nine main tributary systems such as Curly Sedge, Edgars and Malcolm Creeks.

The Merri Creek catchment and surrounding areas are home to some of the endangered vegetation communities. As with most vegetation that has been cleared for human purposes in other

Marine silted and sandstone rocks yellowish layers dated back when the land once was covered with sea and became diminished around 400 million B.C. 65 million years ago, the sandy layer was left behind from non-marine sediment. The volcanic eruption caused a dominated geology alteration and changing the landform. The lava travels through the valleys of major creeks and rivers including the Merri and Darebin to reach Melbourne. The lava flows formed into basalt plains and Merri Creek was shaped for a long time by the direction of lava courses. The Merri Creek catchment has a variety of different type of soils found in one catchment and they are sedimentary, red friable, grey cracking clay, alluvial, gilgai and basaltic

Discussion of catchment user requirement:

The user of the Merri Creek Catchment is everyone who live or work within the catchment and used for different need for each users. The residential/housing are serviced with water for their household need such as laundry, dishwasher and garden as well as personal hygiene like shower and toilet. The recreational of Merri Creek Catchment has many different activities to do and has a choice between land and water. Some example that people were doing while we on the field trip was cycling, playing, picnicking, photography, animal watching, fishing and walking/jogging. The each recreational activity required certain need to be created to go on the land or within the waterways like for example the bicycle and walking/jogging would need a track to follow the path, fishing would has to have a certain designated areas where they would need a deck to fish. Agriculture, clean water supply is one of the main usage of catchment