Dry season water quality at Elsey Station in the upper reaches of the Roper River
Details:
Title
Dry season water quality at Elsey Station in the upper reaches of the Roper River,
Creator
Schult, J.,
Northern Territory. Department of Environment and Natural Resources,
Collection
E-Publications,
E-Books,
PublicationNT,
Mar-18,
Date
2018-06-01,
Location
Roper River, Northern Territory,
Description
As part of the requirements of the Draft Mataranka Tindal Water Allocation Plan (WRD 2011), The Department of Environment and Natural Resources' (DENR) Water Resources Division (WRD) collected water quality data from a range of sites in the Roper River catchment between 2012 and 2017. Sampling was scheduled to coincide with flow monitoring that is conducted biannually in the early and late dry season. A recent review of the Roper River water quality data collected between 2012 and 2016 (Schult and Novak 2017) highlighted the vulnerabilities of this monitoring regime to being affected by storm runoff and the timing of seasonal recession flow. This reduces the sensitivity of the data to detect inter-annual long-term trends in water quality.
Ideally, more frequent measurements would provide a more comprehensive representation of water quality over the dry season, however, due to the remoteness of the catchment, the sampling frequency is constrained by Darwin-based staff availability and resources required to conduct field work in the region. For some water quality parameters, measurements can be collected by deploying logging instrumentation in the river for several months. Maintenance is still required intermittently and parameters that require laboratory analysis, such as nutrient concentrations, cannot be measured in situ. To overcome these difficulties, the Mangarrayi Rangers were engaged to collect weekly water samples and obtain field measurements of water quality to provide a check on the calibration of the loggers over time.
The aims of this study were to:
1. Assess temporal changes in water quality at Elsey Station over one dry season;
2. Test the reliability of automatic turbidity and EC loggers deployed over the dry season; and
3. Assess whether water ample and field data collection by a local ranger group is a viable alternative to data collection by WRD staff.,
Notes
Made available via the Publications (Legal Deposit) Act 2004 (NT),
Table of contents
Acknowledgments -- Content -- Summary -- 1 Introduction -- 1.1 Background and Study Aims -- 1.2 Catchment Description -- 1.3 Study Site -- 2 Methods -- 2.1 Data collection -- 2.2 QA/QC -- 3 Results -- 3.1 Hydrographic data -- 3.2 EC and turbidity -- 3.3 Nutrients -- 4 Discussion -- 4.1 EC and turbidity -- 4.2 Automatic loggers v field measurements -- 4.3 Nutrients -- 4.4 Mangarrayi Ranger collaboration -- 5 Conclusion -- 6 Recommendations -- 7 References -- Appendix 1: Raw field water quality data -- Appendix 2: Correlation matrix of water quality parameters,