Monitoring the effectiveness of interventions and mitigation actions on freshwater improvement
Project Details Ngā taipitopito
Collaborators Ngā haumi
AgResearch | Auckland Council | Bay of Plenty Regional Council | Bridger Consulting | Cawthron Institute | DairyNZ | Department of Conservation | GNS Science | Griffith University | Headwater Hydrology | Horizons Regional Council | Komanawa Solutions | Land Water People | Lincoln University | Marlborough District Council | Ministry for the Environment | Ngāti Kuia | Ngati Raukawa | Pokaiwhenua Catchment Board | Te Hoiere Restoration Project | Traverse Environmental | Waikato Regional Council | Waikato River Authority
Many people are taking action to improve freshwater quality through activities such as stream fencing and planting, wetland restoration, and changes in farming practices.
It is important to understand whether these actions are successful in improving the health of our freshwater systems.
Government regulations introduced in 2020 require action to be taken to improve freshwater where it is degraded, and task regional councils with monitoring both the mitigation actions and their freshwater outcomes.
Our current freshwater monitoring methods and networks are designed to give us information on the state and trend of freshwater but can be ill-suited to robustly establish relationships between improvement actions and their effect.
This research programme is developing a toolkit to help people involved in freshwater improvement actions design monitoring programmes to measure improvements in rivers, lakes and groundwater, and to help them select appropriate monitoring technologies that enable early detection of improvement.
Over time, these monitoring programmes will provide information on successes and failures of past actions, helping prioritise the most effective actions to improve freshwater quality, so our rivers more quickly return to good health.
The toolkit is freely available at monitoringfreshwater.co.nz