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1 Introduction

The Ministry for the Environment’s comprehensive State of the Environment report for New Zealand (ENZ07) required supporting information on water quality state and trends in a representative set of New Zealand rivers. Building on earlier work using the National River Water Quality Network (NRWQN: Scarsbrook 2006), the National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research (NIWA) was contracted to provide summaries of regional council water quality monitoring data from river and stream sites. Data compiled by the Ministry and NIWA for a previous study of national scale patterns in water quality state and trends (Larned et al 2003) was used to provide this assessment.

This brief report summarises the water quality information provided to the Ministry for the ENZ07 report. Readers are referred to Larned et al (2003) for full details of the data sources and a more detailed treatment of the data within a River Environment Classification (Snelder & Biggs 2002) framework. We provide only limited interpretation of the patterns shown in the data, as this was not part of the project brief.

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