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Objective

Recommendation

Key issues

Actions taken

Objective

To ensure that adequate water quality and quantity data are readily available to assist water management decision making.

Recommendation

It is recommended that water quality and water quantity information be made available to State and Local government, industry and the community through Land Information System Tasmania (LIST) at reasonable cost.

Key issues

This information is available from Volume 2 of the last SoE Report (SDAC 1997), which can be downloaded. The final objective, final recommendation, and a summary of key management actions are detailed below.

Actions taken

There has been some progress in addressing the recommendation on water information availability since the previous SoE Report (1997), including the following.

• A draft 'Tasmanian Surface Water Quality Monitoring Strategy' 1999 has been prepared by the Department of Primary Industries, Water and Environment in response to the need for a co-ordinated system for the collection, collation and reporting of water quality information.
   
• The Land Information System Tasmania (LIST) is only one means for water information distribution and may not be most appropriate. The choice of distribution varies with target audience, the spatial scale of the data, the coverage of the data, and cost. Currently, access to water quality, stream gauging and river flow data are available through W.I.R.E.D.. State of the River reports are also now available for several catchments around the State.
   
• The Water Management Act 1999 and the State Water Development Plan 2001 established the framework for an expanded system of stream gauging stations and water quality monitoring in the State. This will increase the current baseline system to an approximate total of some 39 sites across the State. Depending upon site location a variety of water quality and quantity parameters are to be measured.