Upper Taieri Wai - Water Quality Interpretation
Client
Upper Taieri Wai Catchment Group
Experts
Juliet Milne (Traverse Environmental)
Through A2E specialist water quality science support was sought by the Upper Taieri Wai Catchment group to collate and make sense of all readily available monitoring data – including recent data collected by landowners and an irrigation company – in relation to the health of the Taieri River and its tributaries.
The group’s goal was to better define and understand the main issues and drivers that exist or to recommend further monitoring or other work to do enable this.
Juliet Milne (Traverse Environmental) provided expert interpretation of existing monitoring information to support Upper Taieri Wai to understand and prioritise water quality issues in the upper and mid reaches of the Taieri/Taiari River catchment. This work involved a site visit and several discussions with Upper Taieri Wai and other members of the catchment, as well as provision of collated council, consent holder, community and other monitoring details to feed into a whole-of-catchment GIS-based information resource. A report was also prepared.
“A critical part of the work was to ensure that the Upper Taieri Wai and others in the catchment interested in monitoring and improving water quality first had a good understanding of what data already existed and what it was indicating about the health of the river” says Juliet.
“Good information on water quality state and trends is available at the regional scale in Otago but there was a need to look at things on a local scale, making use of all of the available data to tease out what we can about the issues that exist and where there are gaps in understanding or monitoring.”
Three reports were produced, one each for the upper, mid and lower parts of the Taieri catchment.
“Individually, the reports provide an in-depth picture of what monitoring has been done and the key water quality issues at a subcatchment scale” says Sally Dicey, project manager for the Heathy Taieri Integrated Farm Planning project.
“The Taieri is New Zealand’s fourth longest river, flowing through three distinct plains and we wanted to ensure that the rural communities in these areas are armed with information at a local scale so that they can meaningfully engage in important discussions around land management and mitigation practices. This work provides valuable guidance for farm planning and management.”
Sally and the Upper Taieri Wai wanted to acknowledge the A2E fund, noting how grateful they were for being able to access it. “It’s fantastic – it enabled us to have the benefit of Juliet’s expertise and insight on river health in the catchment” says Sally.