Forest Water Catchment Trends in NSW, Australia

New South Wales forested water catchments are analyzed for trends in water quality and quantity. The University of Melbourne produced this data for the Forest Monitoring Steering Committee, with outputs published in June 2022. It contains estimated Mann-Kendall trends for indicators at monitoring sites in catchments with over 50% forest cover.

Use Cases

• Assessing long-term water quality trends in forested catchments based on Mann-Kendall analysis.
• Modeling the relationship between flow, seasonality, and water quality indicators as described in the temporal regression.
• Identifying spatial patterns of significant environmental change across NSW forest water monitoring sites.
• Supporting forest management and policy decisions with trend data on water quantity and quality.

Strengths

• Focus on sites with long-term, frequent, and reliable data as specified in the description.
• Analysis includes a temporal regression model accounting for flow effect, seasonality, and autoregressive residuals.
• Spatial outputs are available via a web application and map feature service.

Limitations

• Data inclusion is limited to catchments with more than 50% forest cover, which may exclude mixed-land-use areas.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count and specific data formats for download are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.

Provenance

Source

University of Melbourne, commissioned by the Forest Monitoring Steering Committee.

Collection Method

Estimated using temporal regression on historical water monitoring site data.

Time Range

Trends were estimated using full historical records for each site, so periods vary by site.

Freshness

Data currency is listed as 22/06/2022, with an update frequency marked as 'Other'.

Geography

Water monitoring sites at the outlet of catchments within New South Wales, Australia.