Rehabilitating Elwood Canal and Elster Creek, Victoria:
	An Assessment of Impacts on Native Freshwater Fishes
	Continued
	Introduction
	As part of a wider community effort to rehabilitate the Elwood Canal and Elster Creek, Earthcare St Kilda Inc commissioned Freshwater Ecology (Arthur Rylah Institute for Environmental Research, DNRE) to undertake a brief assessment of the current ecological status of fish assemblages in the Creek and provide expert advice on issues likely to be affecting fish assemblages. Elster Creek is a short highly modified tributary stream of Port Phillip Bay, Victoria. The lower reaches of Elster Creek are under tidal influence and referred to as Elwood Canal throughout this report. The catchment is highly modified from its natural state by high-density urban development. Despite this, the intrinsic value of streams that flow through urban areas is high and there is substantial effort increasingly being afforded to rehabilitate these systems. This is especially true for the Elster Creek catchment which has potentially high aesthetic and biodiversity values.
	Increases in urbanisation and industrialisation and the intensification or diversification of agriculture may all represent substantial risk to the integrity and sustainability of biodiversity in aquatic ecosystems (Klein 1979; Growns et al. 1998; Sonneman et al. 2001; Wash et al. 2001; Close 2002). Nevertheless, limited information on the ecology of urban and metropolitan watersheds has until recently hindered rehabilitation efforts. This is especially true for the Elster Creek catchment and Elwood Canal for which basic biological information such as fish species richness, abundance and distribution is scarce. These data can provide important information for the conservation of values such as biological diversity, research and education and aesthetics.
	This short study aimed to provide information on the diversity, distribution and abundance of fish species that utilise freshwater for the whole or part of their life cycle in the Elster Creek catchment. This report does not discuss estuarine dependant or marine vagrant species that may utilise Elwood Canal as marine/estuarine species requirements in these environments are complex and beyond the scope of this study. Anthropogenic factors potentially impacting freshwater fish assemblages in the catchment are identified and briefly discussed.
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