Monitoring
Watershed monitoring helps us:
- to identify current issues and project future conditions,
- focus natural resource management actions where they are needed most, and
- track progress over time.
A clean and plentiful water supply is one of our most important natural resources. As various stressors including climate change and urbanization pressures continue, the challenge to maintain high quality and sustainable quantities of surface and groundwater will increase in scope and continued monitoring and reporting is necessary.
Through their work, conservation authorities have identified a number of these impacts such as threats to water quality and quantity, rising temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, shrinking wetlands, and degraded biodiversity.
Regular reporting can assist with targeting rehabilitation and protection programs, improving accountability to the public, municipalities and other stakeholders, as well as supporting some of the broader reporting requirements of provincial and federal governments.
Monitoring watershed conditions helps to inform local watershed plans and programs.
For these report cards, conservation authorities are monitoring and reporting on: