Communities caring for catchments
Module 1 - background
Waterwatch Australia Steering Committee
Environment Australia, June 2003
ISBN 0 6425 4856 0
Clean fresh water is one of our most valuable assets. It is essential for sustaining aquatic environments, agriculture and human health. The effect of our activities on the waters in all parts of Australia should be of major concern to us all.
This section introduces Waterwatch and explains how you can get involved in helping to monitor and care for our waterways.
Waterwatch Australia is an initiative to help us understand, monitor, care for and sustainably manage our most precious natural asset - water. It is a community water monitoring network that is all about understanding and keeping an eye on your local water body - it could be a creek, pond, lake, dam, wetland, lagoon or estuary.
Community water monitoring occurs in every State and Territory. Waterwatch supports a wide range of communities to monitor the health of waterways; to undertake and participate in outreach activities, including environmental education, conferences and workshops; and action programs to protect, rehabilitate or restore the health of our waterways.
Since it began, Waterwatch has formed partnerships with community, government and industry to begin to sustainably address many of the issues that affect water quality and the health of our waterways. Waterwatch is now recognised as one of Australia's most successful environmental initiatives.
The catchcry of Waterwatch is communities caring for catchments, as the involvement of local people is an essential aspect of environmental management. Estimates indicate that regular monitoring occurs at over 7000 sites nationally.
Waterwatch operates as a network of committed people working towards the communities goals and vision. Represenatatives from all States and Territories provide advice and direction to national coordination on a regular basis. This advice assists in determining the national priorities of community water monitoring and increasing national consistency in monitoring, education and delivery.
Across Australia, regional and local coordinators are employed to support the community to understand, protect and restore waterway and catchment health. Coordinators play a vital role to support the community in monitoring and awareness raising activities through:
Through this training and support, people involved in Waterwatch are better able to understand and interpret the results of their monitoring, and design projects to tackle problems they encounter. All the groups and individuals within a catchment are linked through local and regional coordination, ensuring that all data collected is interpreted in the context of the whole catchment.
The Commonwealth provides support via the Natural Heritage Trust for community involvement in water education, monitoring, protection and restoration activities. Contact your regional natural resource / catchment management authority to find out how you can acess support to understand, monitor and improve waterway health in your local area.
You! - and anybody else who cares about the local environment.
The Waterwatch network is made up of individuals, community groups and school groups who regularly check their local waterways, undertake actions to help maintain good water quality, and help raise community awareness about water.
There are different kinds of groups who have an interest in the condition of waterways. Potential partners include schools, Landcare or conservation groups, community groups, service clubs, industry, local businesses, state government agencies, catchment boards and local government.
You may belong to a school and be interested in using a local stream for study or be a member of a local community group concerned about issues in a sub-catchment. Often schools form partnerships with local governments to benefit from linking areas of study to real local and regional issues. Students find it valuable for action-research projects in studies of society and environment, science, health and physical education, technology and the arts. Teachers find Waterwatch valuable in the study of biology, environmental science, chemistry, environmental studies, agricultural studies, science and geography.
Your group may be isolated or be part of a larger catchment or regional Waterwatch network with a well developed structure and plan of action.
For some groups the principal focus is education and awareness, while others may concentrate on gathering data about the condition of the waterway. Other groups may undertake direct remedial action to fix a known problem: for example, some Waterwatch groups carry out community-based conservation activities such as fencing areas of riverbanks, removing litter from waterways, eradicating weeds and invasive species, and reducing the use of pesticides and other pollutants.
Through a team approach, community members can gain access to the expertise and resources of local authorities concerned with water issues. Conversely, local authorities can benefit from your monitoring and from the greater understanding spread through the community.
The Waterwatch Australia National Technical Manual is designed for Waterwatch coordinators, environmental staff, teachers and experienced Waterwatchers to help them support students and the community to undertake waterway health. The manual provides information to help you understand more about the health of Australia's waterways, and the tools to monitor their condition in order to protect and restore them for all.
There are many reasons why individuals and groups are concerned about their waterways. This manual has been designed to meet these varying needs.
The Waterwatch Australia National Technical Manual gives you the tools to progress from concern about the condition of the waterway to acting on issues in a cooperative, informed and effective manner. The broad steps include:
We can come to know our waterways and appreciate them through a variety of monitoring and survey methods. Different methods are suited to different groups with different goals and resources. Methods range from descriptive, for example, presence or absence; to those which involve precise quantitative measurements. The level of confidence you can place in the accuracy of data collected varies according to the methods you use. After reading Module 2 Getting Started: the team, monitoring plan and site, you will be able to decide which monitoring methods will produce the data quality you want.
The manual also gives guidelines on how to plan your monitoring for best results. The plan can be simple or complex but in either case, you will reach your goals more effectively by planning. The monitoring plan (discussed in detail in Module 2) is built around eleven questions:
Q1 Why are you monitoring?
Q2 Who will use your data?
Q3 How will the data be used?
Q4 What will you monitor?
Q5 What data quality do you want?
Q6 What methods will you use?
Q7 Where will you monitor?
Q8 When and how often will you monitor?
Q9 Who will be involved and how?
Q10 How will the data be managed and reported?
Q11 How will you ensure your data are credible?
By following the guidelines in this manual you will be able to effectively work towards healthy waterways for all.