Streamwatch

By empowering local citizens to monitor the health of their waterways and contribute valuable data to the scientific community, Streamwatch helps to raise awareness about the importance of water quality monitoring and conservation, and ultimately supports efforts to protect and preserve our waterways for future generations.

Streamwatch was initiated by Sydney Water and the Sydney Catchment Authority. From it’s humble beginnings, Streamwatch started with a trial of 15 schools in 1990. This led to Waterwatch Australia as the umbrella coordinating group. Streamwatch was move to GSL in 2019.

Since it’s formation, 31,000 data sets to the online database have been collected and cleaned to provide 12,000 consistent data sets, which will be uploaded to the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA). Much of the data is already in SEED (NSW Government’s portal for Sharing and Enabling Environmental Data).

This program has strong quality assurance elements built in to ensure that results are sound, reliable and useful. All Streamwatch groups are required to follow the same methods and use approved equipment to sample and then enter their results into the Streamwatch website.