Scientist baffled at lack of lake’s ‘monitoring buoy’
A FORMER New Zealand academic and freshwater scientist involved in the development of scientific monitoring buoys for lakes in New Zealand ‘‘cannot understand’’ why the Otago Regional Council has been reluctant to fund one for Lake Wanaka.
Professor David Hamilton was University of Waikato’s professor of lakes management and restoration but earlier this year he moved to Griffith University in Brisbane where he is now deputy director of the Australian Rivers Institute.
A lakes and water quality specialist, Prof Hamilton said the ORC was ‘‘way behind’’ other regional councils in not having scientific monitoring buoys in Lake Wanaka and Lake Wakatipu.
He said 16 autonomous water quality monitoring buoys were now deployed in lakes around New Zealand, most of which were paid for by regional councils.
The first one was deployed in Lake Rotorua in 2007 and has been operating almost continuously since.
He said there was now huge pressure on councils to meet the national standards set in the Government’s freshwater policy and historically central government tended to assist regional councils with water quality projects who had ‘‘got their science in order.’’
He said
increasingly
his department at the University of Waikato had been asked by other regional councils to generate ‘‘models’’ of future scenarios of what their lakes might look like in years to come using data in part gathered from scientific buoys in their lakes.
‘‘But not the ORC,’’ he said. University of Waikato Environmental Research Institute research officer Christopher McBride has led the development, construction and deployment of the autonomous water quality monitoring buoys and has been commissioned by University of Otago freshwater scientist Marc Schallenberg to design a scientific monitoring buoy for Lake Wanaka.
Dr Schallenberg said he recently received $30,000 in grants, a third of the cost of the buoy, from a retiring colleague and would seek funding for the remaining two thirds from other sources in the next few weeks.
University of Otago emeritus professor in zoology Carolyn Burns has studied the alpine lakes since the 1970s and has contributed to the study of lake snow.
She said she wanted her unused grant money to go towards a scientific monitoring buoy as there were few of them deployed in deep nutrientpoor lakes in the world and it would contribute to a worldwide network of data.
Mr McBride said he had designed a Limnotrack WQ profiler buoy for Lake Wanaka which was an autonomous, solarpowered water quality monitoring system that had a meteorological weather station mounted above the water and would use an electric winch and armoured data cable, to raise and lower a water quality sensor package throughout the water column many times per day.
He said data from the Lake Wanaka buoy would be sent to the Global Lake Ecological Observatory Network, a grassroots network of limnologists, ecologists, information technology experts, and engineers.
Dr Schallenberg was unaware of moves by the Lakes Wanaka Trust to secure funding for a scientific monitoring buoy but said one was needed in Lake Wakatipu and one in Lake Hayes.
Professor Hamilton said ‘‘the ORC at the highest level has to demonstrate support for it.’’