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How Healthy are our Rivers?

University of Otago researchers are doing a "health check-up" of the Taieri River and its tributaries to see how the results of human activity such as land-use, nutrients and chemicals have harmed their ecosystems. The programme is intended to help authorities develop better ways to manage the "health" of fresh-water bodies such as streams, rivers, lakes and ponds.

"The Taieri offers an ideal setting because it possesses many headwater streams subject to different land-use regimes," programme co-leader Professor Carolyn Burns says. "The main river ranges from free-flowing meandering reaches with associated oxbow lakes (floodplains) to tight and deeply cut sections."

The study is directed at the catchment of the Taieri drainage that contains pristine water bodies and others that have been modified by human activity.

"The New Zealand landscape has been transformed over the past 150 years by the cumulative effects of agriculture, forestry, hydro-electricity, flood control, land drainage and urban development," Burns says.

"These ecosystems are an important part of New Zealand's heritage and vital to the maintenance of water and land biological diversity. Yet it's only in recent decades that serious attention has been paid to the effects of developments on critically affected environmental systems such as those tackled in this work -- rivers, lakes, associated wetlands."

Burns says that few scientific concepts exist to show interest groups how to manage fresh-water ecosystems. This new research aims to overcome this by finding out how land management practices have harmed rivers, lakes and streams. As well, it is aimed at finding out how to control "biologically significant materials, including chemical contaminants arising from human activities, between land and fresh-water systems."

From that the team hopes to develop a documented understanding of how ecosystems react that can be included in planning and management.

Burns says the research underlines the importance of collaboration.

"The overall design of our programme is underpinned by the belief that fresh-water research needs to move from piecemeal study to an approach that recognises the profound linkages that exist between land and water and between the interlinked aquatic components of the whole catchment hierarchy: the Taieri and its associated lakes, wetlands and floodplains."