Working with the Mangaone Catchment Group, part of the national catchment forum run by Crown Research Institutes in New Zealand, Eco Detection and MyEnviro sought to demonstrate that water quality and land use can be linked in a verifiable way.
Installed at Rissington Farm, Eco Detection’s Ion-Q+ provided real-time water quality data and MyEnviro, the land actions to a digital farm plan.
For the first time, powerful shared data can raise awareness, help inform regulations (e.g. fertiliser caps and stocking rates) and ultimately create the behaviour change that can improve the quality of New Zealand’s freshwater resources.
- The program detected trends and patterns at a much faster rate, due to the large sample data set collected: completing four test a day (equating to 1,460 tests per year) which would take 121 years at the rate of one test per month (which is the rate that councils are currently collecting water samples).
- Communities become engaged and interested once they can see live data and trend analysis.
- Alarms may provide early warning systems for illegal dumping.
