Water Monitoring

Water Monitoring - it is an essential part to catchment management. It gives you a starting point, helps you to plan, and continued monitoring can show you what improvements have been made.

Here are some great questions to ask yourself before you begin monitoring:
- What are the water quality issues?
- What are the best methods to deal with these issues?
- What are the goals? Are they measurable?
- How do we set up a monitoring program to measure the success?
- Will the monitoring methods provide adequate feedback to make management decisions?

SHMAK kits:

SHMAK kits or Stream Health Monitoring and Assessment Kits help to measure the health and wellbeing of your waterways.

These are produced by NIWA and the contents is outlined here: https://niwa.co.nz/our-science/freshwater/tools/shmak/manual/about-kit

For information on costs and purchasing contact Stuart Escott on 03 343 7888 or [email protected] (and copy in [email protected] so if he’s away someone else can come back to you).

It would also pay to contact your regional council incase they have a kit available for loan.

This video outlines the contents of a SHAMK kit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kul8pgnty_0

Another great videos explaining more detail about how to do water testing: https://www.youtube.com/user/NZNIWA/videos

A great video made as part of the kaitiaki Raukawa Project on how to use the SHMAK kits.
https://www.youtube.com/Freshwater Monitoring

This is an amusing video on water testing by the brilliant young minds at Te Aho Tu Roa (The Maori arm of Enviroschools). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=je4ndimZaCU

How to take a water sample: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iB7XY3wD1-E

Here are some resources and documents that you might find helpful. Click below to download.

Water Monitoring

SHMAK kits:

Related Documents