A State and Transition framework to guide riparian woodland vegetation management and environmental water decisions

River regulation and water extraction are major threats to the health and persistence of water-dependent ecosystems, such as riparian woodlands and forests. In heavily modified agricultural landscapes, riparian vegetation is also impacted by site-level stressors like livestock grazing, tree clearing, and weed invasions. Complex interactions among spatial and temporal drivers in water-dependent ecosystems can result in poorly articulated conservation objectives and inefficient or siloed management decisions. Where restoration funds and environmental water allocations are limited, these inefficiencies are magnified. We propose a management-focused State and Transition Model to describe the expected interactions among management at different spatial scales, develop measurable objectives and implement targeted monitoring. Derived from a multi-community eucalypt woodland model, the riparian State and Transition Model further refines the states to better describe key indicators of riparian condition and provides a catalogue of transitions describing the key site-level interventions, biotic processes and changes to flows that are expected to drive changes from one state to another. This resource can be used to support spatially explicit strategies and prioritisation of environmental flows or other management actions to improve vegetation condition along regulated waterways. Additionally, we demonstrate how the riparian State and Transition Model can be used for structured decision making, targeted monitoring and adaptive management by land and waterway managers.