Oral Presentation Australian Freshwater Sciences Society Conference 2022

Beyond engagement – insights from 27 years of water quality monitoring in the Upper Murrumbidgee catchment (#45)

Isobel Booksmythe 1 , Danswell Starrs 1 , Woo O'Reilly 1
  1. ACT Government, Dickson, ACT, Australia

Upper Murrumbidgee Waterwatch is a long running citizen science program enlisting volunteers to monitor the health of their local waterways. Beyond the community engagement, education and awareness benefits of connecting people to their local environment, the program generates substantial amounts of water quality data. Consisting of monthly measurements of pH, electrical conductivity, dissolved oxygen, phosphorus and nitrate levels and turbidity across 200+ sites, the Waterwatch data provide some of the best temporal and spatial coverage of water monitoring data in the ACT region. This dataset offers us a valuable opportunity to explore trends in water quality and determine major drivers of water health in the Upper Murrumbidgee catchment, and identify keys to waterway resilience in the urban landscape. In this talk I present a case study investigating the influence of factors including rainfall, underlying geology, and land use on electrical conductivity and nutrient concentrations. While rainfall patterns had the strongest impacts, urban land uses had detectable, detrimental effects on electrical conductivity and concentrations of phosphorus and nitrates. Different land uses were also associated with the amount of variation in these parameters at individual sites over time, suggesting that land use affects the resilience of water quality to environmental variability.