Connecting Soil and Water Quality

How can the research be used? Ka pēhea e whai take ai te rangahau?

• The research team aims to create an interactive map to convey findings from this research, such as soil and water quality at catchment scale. It will be open source and freely accessible to all. This will align closely to the work of the Monitoring Freshwater Improvement Actions research programme.
• The research will link steady-state soil quality indicators (recent medians of, for example, soil organic matter, anaerobically mineralizable nitrogen, Olsen phosphorus) to steady-state indicators of land use pressure (including stock numbers, nitrate loss, magnitude of capital expenditure for a catchment). Linking soil quality trends to land-use pressure trends will enable the research team to explore whether there are differences because of dominant land use.
• Those soil quality trends will also be linked to water quality trends (from indicators including dissolved inorganic N, total N, dissolved reactive P, total P, suspended sediment, turbidity, E. coli) across all catchments with data for 1990–2018, with a subsequent focus on low vs high pressure catchments.
• Evidence from this research will better inform the current suite of soil quality indicators reported nationally, and to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).