Freshwater Update 73, May 2017

Freshwater Update 73 brings you the latest information from our Freshwater & Estuaries Centre, with a focus on streams, rivers and irrigation, as well as introducing new members of staff.

 

Co-innovation and Water Management

Rainfall in many irrigated regions of NZ is uniformly distributed (in time) and, theoretically, irrigations could be scheduled based around forecast rainfall. However, in the absence of easy access to reliable rainfall forecast information, farmers seldom irrigate based upon forecast, often irrigating right before significant rainfall events, resulting in the loss of water and nutrients from the root-zone, either by drainage and leaching, or via overland flow.

NZ river maps

This is an interactive web-based application being developed for exploring national scale predictions of a suite of river environmental variables, including water quality, hydrology, bed sediment size, invertebrate metrics, fish presence and bed sediment cover.

New staff

A number of new staff have joined the Freshwater and Estuaries Centre over the last few months, either on a permanent or fixed-term basis. Here we introduce new permanent and post-doctoral staff based at our Hamilton and Christchurch offices.