Catchment: Fitzroy River

The Fitzroy River in the Kimberley discharges into King Sound, about midway between Broome and Derby. It has a catchment of approximately 93,000 square kilometres. Its major tributary is the Margaret River which joins the Fitzroy just upstream of Fitzroy Crossing.

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Socio-economic Profiles for the Fitzroy and surrounding catchments

The population of the Fitzroy catchment is approximately 7,000, a high percentage of which (64%) are Aboriginal people. The catchment area is more than 93,000 km2, so the population density is less that 0.1 person per km2 and the population is relatively mobile.

More than 65% of the households own a motor vehicle, about half have internet connection at home, and some 60% of people speak English only at home – these percentages are very typical of the TRaCK region. The Fitzroy has an ARIA (Accessibility / Remoteness Index of Australia) of 12 (on the scale of 15), that is higher than the regional average of 10. This indicates that people in this catchment must travel further than most, to access a full range of goods and services.

Almost half of the people in the catchment are employed by government administration or services, with a small percentage spread over other sectors.

The region is relatively well surveyed and thus hosts a number of registered heritage sites. Almost all of the land in the catchment is reported as under agricultural production, with a small percentage being under conservation. (synopsis from TRaCK Fact Sheet, Socio-economic Profiles: Alexandridis K, Larson S. 2009. Profile: Fitzroy River. )

Graph for Fitzroy

Projects operating in the catchment

1: Scenario Evaluation
Project	Project Leader
1.2: New ways of better involving Indigenous people in planning for our water and land resources	Owen Stanley

2: Assets and Values
Project	Project Leader
2.1: The value of Australia’s tropical rivers	Anna Straton
2.2: Indigenous values and river flows	Sue Jackson

4: Material Budgets
Project	Project Leader
4.1: Catchment water budgets and water resource assessment	Richard Cresswell
4.6: Trial of the Framework for the Assessment of River and Wetland Health (FARWH) in the wet/dry tropics	Simon Townsend

5: Foodwebs and biodiversity
Project	Project Leader
5.1: Bottom up and top down control of tropical river food webs	Michael Douglas
5.2: Refugial Pools. Importance of waterholes as aquatic refugia and the biophysical processes that sustain them	Prof Stuart Bunn
5.5: Flow-ecology relationships for biodiversity and ecosystem processes	Peter Davies
5.7: Environmental flow tools for northern rivers (synthesis project)	Peter Davies Brad Pusey