New Zealand River Habitat workshop

The workshop arose from the perceived lack of agreed New Zealand measures to assess or manage physical habitat of large rivers, the ongoing alterations to large river habitat and increasing interest in setting management objectives and restoring rivers.

The ambitious workshop goal was to “Agree on a set of metrics and methods for assessing habitat in ‘large’ (=> order 5) rivers and define bands of habitat quality /natural character that could be used in setting physical objectives for riverine habitats, including defining what comprises good river habitat in New Zealand.”

Seven presentations from a broad range of specialists involved with river habitat set the scene for the workshop and encouraged the subsequent interdisciplinary discussions that workshop participants agreed were necessary to assess NZ river habitat.

Mātauranga Māori was not captured at the workshop and this is acknowledged as a gap. While a large list of river habitat measures were grouped under 3 broad categories (Bed/cover/form, Hydro/hydraulics and Connectivity/floodplain) were captured, vital metrics to be measured were not finalised. Workshop participants made an initial attempt to draft plain language descriptions of “excellent” and “poor” river habitat quality. For this exercise, workshop participants were divided into three groups, which each produced broadly similar narrative descriptions of “excellent” & “poor” river habitat classes.

The workshop should be seen as one of the first steps in our endeavours to sustainably manage physical habitats of NZ rivers which will complement the more developed water quality attributes.

Workshop outputs will include:

• A summary including the list of metrics, metric categories and descriptions of poor and excellent river habitat
• Web delivery of presentations and summary.
• Upon agreement on authorship and scope, a Discussion Document on NZ River Habitat is also proposed following further discussions.