Two reports released today by NIWA and the Deep South National Science Challenge reveal new information about how many New Zealanders, how many buildings and how much infrastructure could be affected by extreme river and coastal flooding from storms and sea-level rise.
A NIWA scientist who spent years poring over handwritten scientific notes stored in about 50 large wooden drawers, has seen the fruits of her labour now being used in ways she never imagined.
Bringing together leading scientific organisations and regional councils, this project develops a sophisticated computer modelling framework that will enable users to accurately predict how much freshwater is available, where it has come from, and how quickly it moves in New Zealand catchments.
Most of the plastic in the ocean originates on land, being carried to the estuaries and coasts by rivers. Managing this plastic on land before it reaches the river could be the key to stemming the tide of marine-bound plastics. The aim of this project is to understand the sources and fate of plastic pollution carried by urban rivers using the Kaiwharawhara Stream as a case study.
Excessive nutrient input (eutrophication) threatens many New Zealand estuaries causing ecological problems, such as algal blooms and poor physical and chemical conditions for estuarine life.
Two reports released today by NIWA and the Deep South National Science Challenge reveal new information about how many New Zealanders, how many buildings and how much infrastructure could be affected by extreme river and coastal flooding from storms and sea-level rise.
Most of the plastic in the ocean originates on land, being carried to the estuaries and coasts by rivers. Managing this plastic on land before it reaches the river could be the key to stemming the tide of marine-bound plastics. The aim of this project is to understand the sources and fate of plastic pollution carried by urban rivers using the Kaiwharawhara Stream as a case study.
Bringing together leading scientific organisations and regional councils, this project develops a sophisticated computer modelling framework that will enable users to accurately predict how much freshwater is available, where it has come from, and how quickly it moves in New Zealand catchments.
A NIWA scientist who spent years poring over handwritten scientific notes stored in about 50 large wooden drawers, has seen the fruits of her labour now being used in ways she never imagined.
Swimming is a popular activity in Aotearoa-New Zealand. Two attributes of waters that strongly affect aesthetic quality and safety for swimming are visual clarity and faecal contamination. It turns out that these two attributes are fairly well-correlated (inversely) in New Zealand rivers, such that (easily seen) visual clarity provides a rough-but-useful guide to (unseen) microbial quality.
A technical guide to the Periphyton Attribute Note under the National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management (NPS-FM) 2014 (as amended 2017) has been released, as a draft, this month by the Ministry for the Environment.
A senior NIWA scientist is concerned many councils are having difficulty “getting off the starting blocks” when it comes to planning for coastal climate change.
Demand for water has intensified over the past two decades at a phenomenal rate in New Zealand. Most easy-to-abstract direct run-of-stream resources (i.e. flows without existing upstream modification) are already highly allocated in many regions.
Te Waikoropupū Springs near Takaka are the largest freshwater springs in New Zealand, the largest cold-water springs in the Southern Hemisphere, and are nationally and internationally valued for their remarkable colour and clarity.
Excessive nutrient input (eutrophication) threatens many New Zealand estuaries causing ecological problems, such as algal blooms and poor physical and chemical conditions for estuarine life.