They will eventually be places of beauty but at the moment they are sites of engineering dexterity, an almost $100 million effort to create wetlands, rain gardens and ponds across the ACT to improve the quality of our lakes and rivers.

The ACT Healthy Waterways Project is a joint initiative of the Commonwealth and ACT governments to improve long-term water quality in the ACT and further downstream in the Murrumbidgee River system.

Part of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan and with a budget of $93.5 million, the project is 90 per cent funded by the Commonwealth, the remainder by the ACT.

It involves the construction of a range of infrastructure - ponds, wetlands, rain gardens and swales as well as waterway restoration that will prevent harmful runoff as well as solid rubbish from entering the lakes and rivers and reduce the risk of problems such as blue-green algae outbreaks.

The scale of the project is considerable, with Healthy Waterways project manager Justin Foley saying about 1 million water-based plants, alone, will be put in the ground to bring the wetlands and other projects to life.