Water Management
Environmental monitoring
The NSW Government recognises that our rivers and groundwater systems are threatened by over-extraction of water. Water sharing plans have been developed to establish rules for sharing water between the environmental needs of a river or aquifer and all other water users, including town and rural water, industry and irrigation.
The Department of Water and Energy monitors the effects of water sharing plans to determine whether they are succeeding in improving the health of our rivers and aquifers.
It is important that we understand the reasons for any changes to our rivers, and know how to use that knowledge to improve the way we manage water resources. Monitoring not only assesses how our rivers are responding to environmental flows, but also investigates how different patterns of water flow affect the way our rivers function. We also monitor our rivers and floodplains to ascertain their health. We are interested in the river’s physical form, its fringing vegetation and what sort of fish and insects live in our rivers. All this information is then used to gauge the 'health' of or rivers and floodplain systems.
As our scientific understanding increases, we will be able to more effectively allocate water to the environment and other water users, and better evaluate the performance of water sharing plans. Scientific feedback makes efficient sharing of water possible.
The Department is currently involved in the following environmental monitoring projects:
- Surface Water Monitoring Network: continuous monitoring sites at over 900 river, lake and storage gauging stations, collection of water quality sample data from over 350 sites and continuous monitoring of water quality at over 800 sites
- Regulated rivers: Integrated Monitoring of Environmental Flows program monitors the ecological response to environmental flow rules in the state's major regulated river systems, and the Barwon-Darling River
- Unregulated rivers: Environmental monitoring of unregulated river systems to assist development and implementation of water sharing plans
- Snowy River: Environmental flows response monitoring program monitors the impacts of the additional flows being provided under the Snowy Initiative
- Shoalhaven River: Monitoring environmental flows for the lower Shoalhaven River to improve river health and to better mimic the natural river flows
- Greater Sydney Metropolitan Area and Hawkesbury-Nepean River
- Sustainable Rivers Audit: Coordinated by the Murray-Darling Basin Authority to assess the ecological condition and health of the rivers throughout the Murray-Darling Basin
- Catchment monitoring: Measuring and reporting on progress towards the Government’s statewide ’river health ’ targets and defining the physical form of our rivers using River Styles®
- Groundwater monitoring: continuous monitoring at 400 groundwater sites and manually monitoring from a network of more than 3,000 groundwater monitoring bores, where we record aquifer data from the 100,000 bores that have been sunk in NSW
- Metering: Effective water management requires accurate and reliable information on the amount of water extracted by water users.