About Upper Murrumbidgee Waterwatch
Upper Murrumbidgee Waterwatch (Waterwatch):
- Engages the community in the environment through monitoring and caring for our catchments
- Educates and raises awareness in schools and the community on issues concerning catchment health
- Uses data collected by volunteers to inform policy and on ground catchment management.
Waterwatch engages with the community to monitor and raise awareness of our local waterways. Running for over 20 years, the program covers the Murrumbidgee River and Yass River catchments upstream of Burrinjuck Dam - an area of more than 11,000km2.
The Waterwatch program could not exist without the effort and commitment of volunteers. One of the core activities of Waterwatch is to provide volunteers with a water quality monitoring kit and train them in how to use it. Volunteers use the kit to collect monthly data at a dedicated site along a river or a wetland. In addition, Waterwatch staff work with volunteers to collect complementary data on aquatic macroinvertebrates (water bugs) and riverbank vegetation - both of which provide insight into the health of our catchment. This information is used to produce the Waterwatch annual report, the Catchment Health Indicator Program (CHIP) report which is used by a range of different land managers.
Waterwatch has 220 active sites being monitored across the region by over 200 volunteers. The publicly-accessible Waterwatch database currently has over 25,000 water quality records.
In addition, Waterwatch asks volunteers to report sightings of carp breeding activity every Spring for the Carp Love 20°C campaign and run group volunteer-assisted platypus surveys every August as part of Platypus Month.
About the Upper Murrumbidgee Catchment
What is a catchment?
A catchment is a series of connected landscapes that collectively surround a river or creek system and direct water (via rainfall) to that river or creek system via surface and sub-surface flows. Catchments can be very large, like the Murray Darling Basin and smaller versions can sometimes be referred to as sub-catchments or tributaries.
The Murrumbidgee catchment sits within the Murray Darling Basin and the Upper Murrumbidgee catchment consists of the Murrumbidgee River and all its tributaries upstream of Burrinjuck Dam, near Yass.
For the purposes of Waterwatch, the upper Murrumbidgee catchment is broken up into five main sub-catchments:
- Ginninderra - Gungahlin, Hall and Belconnen
- Molonglo - Woden, Queanbeyan, Captains Flat region, Inner North and South Canberra and Weston Creek
- Southern ACT - Tuggeranong, Tharwa and the Namadgi and Cotter Reserves
- Cooma - Cooma, Numeralla, Bredbo, Michaelago and northern section of Kosciuszko National Park
- Yass - Yass, Sutton, Gundaroo and Murrumbateman