Land and Water New Zealand
Summary
- There are 3 posts — by 3 authors — in this topic.
- Latest post made by Adrian Meredith at 2010 Jun 08 15:19 NZST
Land and Water New Zealand http://lawnz.projectx.co.nz/ includes an interactive map showing river water quality around New Zealand. Is anyone using Land and Water New Zealand? Can someone explain the background to this?
Dan -- Dan Randow Dataversity Facilitator http://dataversity.org.nz and Chief Wrangler OnlineGroups.Net +64-3-377-5377 +64-27-431-4928 409 Kenton Chmbrs, 190 Hereford St, Christchurch PO Box 739, Christchurch, 8140 Aotearoa (New Zealand) http://onlinegroups.net http://groupserver.org http://twitter.com/danrandow Skype: vonrandow
Thanks for the heads up, i've never seen or heard of this before. I've just tried it here at home and have a few observations 1. It's obviously in the early stages as only limited content is available currently. 2. No expensive has been spared on making it look flash, i mean BLING BLING OMG! 3. It appeared all this bling or for some other reason it felt like i needed a similar level of computing power as a small third world country to run it. In saying that everything seemed to work as intended which i was impressed by. 4. They do appear to forget some rules of website design, there are no breadcrumbs! 5. It appears that it only provides ECANs results for November or December 2008 (depending on site) which means it has next to no use for anyone with more than a passing interest in water quality. Also it only provides one record (i couldn't find a way to access any more) 6. Couldn't find an explanation of their quartile system, i can guess but would be easier if they just explained. 7. It also further perpetuates the myth that you can measure water quality through single discrete grab samples and measure chemical parameters and draw conclusions about the health of the waterway (but don't get me started on that). 8. It doesn't give you any information regarding what the numbers mean expect quartiles which mean little in the absence of any information on water standards, or ecological thresholds. To concluded despite way list of concerns i'm very interested in this initiative, i'd be interested in what the purpose of this website is for. However i can see myself deriving any benefit from it at this stage. Cheers, Dale McEntee
Dale, you are right, this is a 'project under development' that has been
stumbled across. Many of your criticiams are because the site is
incomplete and is still being worked on. Up until recently the
development site was password protected, but that was removed to allow
more RC contributers easier access to offer suggestions.
Land and Water NZ is a front name for a regional council initiative,
jointed funded by the Regional Councils and endorsed by the regional
CEOs'. It strives to set up a platform to display all regional council
monitoring data in a common manner NATIONALLY. Water quality is the
first module (off the stand) but the vision is to be able to display
data gathered by Regional Councils from all of their functions
(transport, air quality, biosecurity etc. etc.). Surely an admirable
objective.
As the first module the surface water quality page has come under a lot
of internal scrutiny, and is not promoted as live because there is
ongoing development, debate and discussion. It is not portraying as
much accessible data as say the Horizons RC webpages ('water quality
matters') but that is one of the constraints the site development has
had to contend with. Many of the site and parameter text explanations
are also still not included (some of Dale's complaints in particular).
Agreements to date are to display both the most recent data point and a
median of the last 5 years (and the quartiles). However underlying it
is a QA'd database of all national RC SOE water quality data (and
hopefully some TA data)for the last 5 years from several hundred sites.
That is surely a major advance and something to be encouraged rather
than prematurely criticised.
As anyone that has worked on trying to get data from several
organisations bundled together into a single platform, this has been a
big but rewarding undertaking, and one that we hope to encourage more
of.
I have emailed the project manager of the site development to contribute
a more formal or complete response to Dataversity, and he says that he
will post a response in a couple of days on his return to the office.
Cheers
Adrian Meredith
Principal Water Quality Scientist
Environment Canterbury.
-----Original Message----- From: <email obscured> <email obscured>] On Behalf Of dale.mcentee Sent: Monday, 7 June 2010 10:09 p.m. To: <email obscured> Subject: [dataversity public discussion] Land and Water New Zealand Thanks for the heads up, i've never seen or heard of this before. I've just tried it here at home and have a few observations 1. It's obviously in the early stages as only limited content is available currently. 2. No expensive has been spared on making it look flash, i mean BLING BLING OMG! 3. It appeared all this bling or for some other reason it felt like i needed a similar level of computing power as a small third world country to run it. In saying that everything seemed to work as intended which i was impressed by. 4. They do appear to forget some rules of website design, there are no breadcrumbs! 5. It appears that it only provides ECANs results for November or December 2008 (depending on site) which means it has next to no use for anyone with more than a passing interest in water quality. Also it only provides one record (i couldn't find a way to access any more) 6. Couldn't find an explanation of their quartile system, i can guess but would be easier if they just explained. 7. It also further perpetuates the myth that you can measure water quality through single discrete grab samples and measure chemical parameters and draw conclusions about the health of the waterway (but don't get me started on that). 8. It doesn't give you any information regarding what the numbers mean expect quartiles which mean little in the absence of any information on water standards, or ecological thresholds. To concluded despite way list of concerns i'm very interested in this initiative, i'd be interested in what the purpose of this website is for. However i can see myself deriving any benefit from it at this stage. Cheers, Dale McEntee ----------------------------------------- Full text of this topic in Dataversity Public Discussion: http://dataversity.org.nz/r/topic/5bp0JVkSvulOnHBlnFeuHr To leave Dataversity Public Discussion, email <email obscured>?Subject=unsubscribe Start your own free groups and site with OnlineGroups.Net http://onlinegroups.net Host your own online groups site with GroupServer http://groupserver.org ********************************************************************** This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential and intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they are addressed. If you have received this email in error please notify the system manager. This footnote also confirms that this email message has been swept by MIMEsweeper for the presence of computer viruses. www.clearswift.com **********************************************************************
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