River Water Quality Monitoring 1990 to 2018: Nitrate in Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland's raw river and lake monitoring data from 1990 to 2018, collected for Water Framework Directive compliance. The dataset contains unprocessed measurements, including nitrate levels, from monitoring sites across surface waters. It supports assessments of biological quality, hydromorphology, and physico-chemical properties like temperature and nutrients.

Use Cases

• Tracking long-term nitrate concentration trends in Northern Irish rivers and lakes.
• Assessing raw physico-chemical parameters like temperature and oxygenation for preliminary water quality screening.
• Supporting research on biological quality indicators (fish, invertebrates, flora) referenced in the assessment criteria.
• Informing regulatory reporting for 'Good Ecological Status' and 'Good Chemical Status' targets.
• Identifying potential data anomalies or contamination events flagged in the raw, unprocessed results.

Strengths

• Provides a long-term time series covering nearly three decades (1990 to 2018).
• Cross-platform presence on UK and EU open data portals indicates official importance and accessibility.
• Released under an open government license (OGL-UK-3.0), permitting reuse.

Limitations

• Metadata completeness is medium; specific column names, row counts, and file sizes are not provided.
• The data is explicitly described as raw and unprocessed, containing potential errors from typos, sampling, or contamination.
• Critical information for official status calculations (Limits of Detection, altitude, alkalinity) is absent.

Provenance

Source

OpenDataNI / Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs (DAERA), Northern Ireland

Collection Method

Monitoring from river and lake sites, likely collected by the Northern Ireland Environment Agency (NIEA).

Time Range

1990 to 2018

Freshness

2026-04-15 14:19:58.234834

Geography

Northern Ireland (rivers, lakes, transitional waters, and coastal waters)