Muddy, faecally‐contaminated river flood plumes in coastal waters are a hazard to contact recreation and bivalve shellfish consumption but are difficult to study, being episodic and transient. We used a new underway flow‐through sampler in a small, fast boat, to map a flood plume within Wellington Harbour, while simultaneously sampling water in the Hutt River inflow. Faecal contamination (indexed by E.coli) correlated with flo...

Water is an important component of many recreational opportunities and New Zealand invests significant resources in recreational water quality (RWQ) monitoring to assess risks to public health. However, monitoring primarily focuses on microbiological hazards and RWQ is considerably broader than this. The goal of this study was to take a comprehensive approach to evaluating RWQ while exploring the potential for greater public i...

We assessed the reproducibility of river state‐of‐environment (SoE) water quality measurements in the Wellington Region, New Zealand (NZ). Field staff from GWRC and NIWA conducted 29 side‐by‐side water sampling and in‐situ measurements at six river sites of diverse water quality for 12 variables measured routinely in river SoE monitoring across NZ. Field measurements of water temperature, dissolved oxygen, electrical conductiv...