Monitoring Freshwater Improvement Actions

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

• The toolkit produced by this research will help everyone involved in freshwater improvement actions (councils, iwi, co-governance entities and catchment groups) robustly monitor rivers, lakes and groundwater aquifers to detect early improvement. For example, the toolkit will enable a regional authority to find out whether its existing freshwater monitoring network is suitable to detect water quality improvements resulting from the implementation of a freshwater plan.
• The toolkit provides new tools and resources to decide what to measure, where, when, with what technology, and how much it will cost. It is supported by open-source code and is freely available.
• The research explores which monitoring designs best facilitate a te ao Māori-framed approach to detecting the effects of whenua-based mitigation actions on wai Māori.
• An online interface allows people to define a level of expected reductions in the losses of the four main contaminants (nitrogen, phosphorus, sediment and coli) from various types of land use and land cover within a catchment, or to directly define the level of water quality improvement they are hoping to see. The online tool provides guidance on best monitoring locations, durations and frequencies for key water quality and ecological indicators to detect improvements.
• Catchment groups or their freshwater advisors can use the online tool to identify where monitoring would be best targeted, how many sites should be monitored and how often they should be monitored to measure the success of their management actions.
• A factsheet will summarise monitoring technologies and costs for each key water quality and ecological indicator.