February 2005, Ref. ME590
Building on the findings of the 2002 report, this report describes a subsequent study of patterns in water quality that uses additional monitoring data from all regional councils. Regional and national trends in water quality, related to factors such as climate and land use are reported using the River Environment Classification (REC).
Availability:
This short report presents summary data and statistics from a subset of the data used for the analyses presented in the 2002 report, see above. The analyses in this report exclude the 77 sites from the National River Water Quality Network that are the subject of independent analyses in the report State and Trends in the National River Water Quality Network (1989-2005).
In the report "Nationwide and regional state and trends in water quality 1996-2002", the levels of E.coli that exceeded 2002 Microbiological Water Quality Guidelines (for recreation) were derived by comparing site means against the guideline value. However the guideline refers to medians.
The E.coli data have since been corrected using medians and the results are provided in the report, Levels of E.coli in New Zealand rivers. In this report, levels of E. coli have also been compared to guideline levels in the more recent 2003 Microbiological Guidelines for Marine and Freshwater Recreation.