About the Toolkit
The eWater Toolkit is your one-stop shop for water and catchment management utility tools backed by a community of practice. Most of the tools are available as freeware.
Now with more than 12,000 users in over 120 countries, the Toolkit is a web-based distribution point for hydrological, ecological and catchment management models, databases and other resources useful to all involved in land and water management or related areas of R&D.
What's on offer
- Refine knowledge base searches to your theme area or of interest
- Access discussion forums for sharing ideas on water management issues
- View tools related to your theme of interest
- Find geographically relevant resources via map searches
- Utilise online tools
Please note: some of the features listed above are restricted to Toolkit members. There is no charge to join the Toolkit, so why not become a member and access them all?
Purpose and target users
The Toolkit lets people working in water and catchment management to trial and adopt decision and analysis tools, backed by a library of technical information.
Become a Toolkit member to be part of best-practice thinking, find a repertoire of resources, and share experiences, tools, and fresh ways of addressing recurring problems.
The Toolkit contains the popular tools RAP, RRL, Aquacycle, CLASS and SedNet as well as information on TIME (The Invisible Modelling Environment), a code-base and algorithm library.
The tools help predict the multiple impacts of land and water management decisions across an entire catchment. They are designed for analysis of catchments, rivers, terrain, ecological response, urban water, vegetation, water quality and quantity and water trading.
With its protocols and underlying philosophy of supporting users, the Toolkit has become more than a collection of software.
Not only does it put water and catchment research directly into the hands of the water management industry and researchers, it has also generated a community of practice in catchment and water management and research.
It now also offers resources on five themes: urban water, river management, ecology and restoration, catchment modelling, monitoring and assessment. Resources include documents and weblinks.
Throughout its life online to date, including several iterations, the eWater Toolkit has proved to be unlike anything else in the water management field.
The eWater Toolkit currently contains software, databases and information resources concerned with hydrology, catchment management, and freshwater ecology, in urban and rural environments.
In total, the Toolkit delivers around 24 software tools that are freely available.
History and future
The Toolkit was first released in 2003 by the CRC for Catchment Hydrology (CRCCH) as the Catchment Modelling Toolkit.
Since that time, the Toolkit has become the home of a wide range of tools related to water modelling and management activities.
Now supported by eWater, the scope of the Toolkit has become broader to encompass a range of information resources on a wider range of water management topics.
Following redevelopment activities by the eWater CRC in 2008, the site aims to build on its existing activities and provide a base for water resource sector participants to form communities where information and tools can be shared and maintained for many years to come.
