Mapping of gaining and losing streams
Many of NZ’s lowland rivers and streams are closely connected with the underlying groundwater.
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.
Many of NZ’s lowland rivers and streams are closely connected with the underlying groundwater.
New Zealand boasts around 425,000 km of rivers and streams, with half of these being small headwater streams. Many of these small first order streams have never been accurately captured digitally, meaning that the true hydrological extent of many catchments is poorly or incompletely known.
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.
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.
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.
Links to the latest Freshwater and Estuaries information that's available since last update.