State and Trends in the National River Water Quality Network (1989-2005)

• Executive Summary
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The National River Water Quality Network
• 3 Water Quality State (2005)
• 4 Changes in Water Quality State (1989-2005)
• 5 River Water Quality Trends (1989-2003)
• 6 Discussion
• 7 References

1 Introduction

The purpose of this report is to summarise water quality patterns in a selection of rivers around New Zealand and, in doing so, provide an assessment of the current state and recent trends in river water quality at the national scale. This information will be used by the Ministry for the Environment to highlight water quality issues in New Zealand and to assist in reporting on the state of the environment to the New Zealand public and international organisations (eg, OECD). Much of the information in this report will be made available through the Ministry's website.

All data used in this report was sourced from the National River Water Quality Network (NRWQN), a component of NIWA's "Nationally Significant Database: Water Resource and Climate" Programme, which is funded through the Foundation for Research, Science & Technology. Much of the work presented in this report stems from research currently being written up for scientific publication (Scarsbrook et al in prep.).

The report is divided into five subsections:

1. a brief description of the NRWQN
2. a summary of current water quality state (2005 data)
3. a summary of moving annual state (1989-2005)
4. presentation of results from detailed trend analyses carried out for the period 1989-2003
5. a discussion of results in relation to water quality management in New Zealand.

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