Online portal tests the waters

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Online portal improves water monitoring

Jennifer Foreshew | November 03, 2009

A DATA integration system that provides unprecedented access to the health of southeast Queensland waterways could be used for other regions in Australia and internationally.

The system, known as Health-e-Waterways, delivers current and historical ecosystem health reports for catchments, estuaries and bay zones through an online portal.

The $1.48 million Health-e-Waterways project is funded by the Queensland government and research partners the University of Queensland, Microsoft and the Southeast Queensland Healthy Waterways Partnership.

Queensland University project leader and e-Research Lab director Jane Hunter said the project's main objective was to open up access to water quality data "as well as integrating these databases, which are currently hosted by different organisations and behind firewalls throughout Queensland".

The data is held by a variety of sources, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Queensland Department of Environment and Resource Management, councils, the CSIRO, universities and community groups.

Professor Hunter said the reports, accessed through the portal, www.health-e-water ways.org, included water-quality measures including physical chemical indicators, fish species and ecosystem processes.

"Then there are graphs which show you how those indicators have changed over time and over region," she said.

The information was expected to be used by natural resources managers, government policymakers, scientists, the public and community groups.

"This report card has been available, but only as a hard copy, which took almost six months to produce, and all of the graphs were generated manually using Photoshop Illustrator -- so now all of those graphs are dynamically generated from the underlying databases," Professor Hunter said.

She said links to other data sets such as water quantity would be added.


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