As yet, the Know Your Catchment platform is restricted to the Waitaki River catchment in South Canterbury-North Otago, but there is a possibility it might go wider.
“It depends on the resources and interest,” IrrigationNZ’s regional policy and planning manager Elizabeth Soal says.
“There is one catchment in the North Island and another in the South Island which have expressed interest.
“This platform will engage and educate both rural and urban communities about the commitment farmers and growers have made to maintaining and improving water quality with information about water quality, irrigation, recreation, wetlands and more.
“Given the public feeling about water quality, farmers and growers need to openly demonstrate the practice change that is happening and all the robust environmental monitoring data needs to be consolidated in an easy-to-understand way – which is what Know Your Catchment does.”
Besides showing water monitoring data, the platform contains stories about catchments – for example, the riparian planting that is being done.
Soal says farmers and growers were doing a lot of monitoring in their catchments and bringing this data together to tell the catchment story was important.
Comparing it to the Land Air Water Aotearoa (LAWA) website, she says the LAWA information was collated by regional councils, which could take some time, whereas this information was more recent.
“It’s more up-to-date and also more fine grained, with more sites. Some of the LAWA data was collated a year to 18 months beforehand, whereas ours is a few weeks,” she says.
“It’s also about building information over time, not just the data, but qualitative information about what’s happening in the catchment, projects that are going on and significant events.”
In future, it might contain water use data and information from irrigation schemes.
The portal was targeted towards the community at large and for farmers with the idea that it might show up trends or hot spots in water quality so that farm environment plans might address specific issues.
Work on the platform started in 2018.
While the pilot has cost $180,000, Soal says a lot of that was initial scoping and she did not expect further rollouts to cost as much. She would not name the regions which had expressed interest in having it for their catchment.
The pilot has been funded by the Ministry of Primary Industries Sustainable Food and Fibre Futures Fund and managed by IrrigationNZ in partnership with Waitaki Irrigators Collective, Otago Regional Council and Environment Canterbury and supported by Beef & Lamb NZ and the Foundation for Arable Research.
