Rivers dashboard

The Rivers dashboard has five modules providing guidance on the likelihood of detecting changes in a range of key water quality and ecological indicators, at existing monitoring sites and across the whole stream network of the selected catchment. These are the 'Water Quality', 'Ecology' and 'Minimum Detectable Improvement' modules.

Two other modules give useful information for river monitoring programme design. The Land Mitigation module is a tool for mapping the potential contaminant loss reductions from land parcels in a selected catchment, and seeing how these relate to modelled reductions in river contaminant loads. ‍

High Flow Contaminant Load module gives an indication of the proportion of annual contaminant loads that occurs during high flow conditions.  
The

Download load the draft WebApp User Guide.

Likelihood of detecting modelled water quality improvement in all river reaches of a catchment as a result of land mitigation

Likelihood of detecting user-specified improvement in water quality indicators at existing monitoring sites

Prioritising location of ecological monitoring sites across a catchment to detect effects of land mitigation

Likelihood of detecting user-specified improvement in ecological indicators at existing monitoring sites

Mitigatable reductions in contaminant losses from land and predicted in-river contaminant load reductions

Proportion of annual contaminant loads during high river flows

Minimum water quality improvement detectable by monitoring at existing river monitoring sites

Developing the Rivers dashboard of the WebApp

There were many datasets that went into developing the Rivers WebApp

  • The New Zealand Land Cover Database (LCDB) Version Five was used as the base for our land cover data for all of New Zealand.
  • To improve the pastoral land cover/use areas, we obtained data developed from the research project Quantifying contaminant losses to water from pastoral land uses in New Zealand III. What could be achieved by 2035? This data contained updated information of the locations of pastoral land use (sheep and beef/dairy) as well as the maximum possible mitigation improvements associated with these lands.
  • The catchments and the associated river network are from the New Zealand River Environment Classification (REC) Version 2.5 and we defined catchments in the WebApp as starting at the coast with at least a 3rd order stream. We also decided to only use 3rd order segments and greater throughout the country.Consequently, all 1st and 2nd order streams were aggregated to the nearest higher order downstream segment. This was done for both the segments and the catchments.
  • The overall catchment outlines were exported for direct use in the WebApp. Each catchment had their river segments clipped and stored in a file key-valued at a base to be used directly in the WebApp and subsequent processing.