Heritage study  

As part of increasing our understanding we're researching the natural and cultural heritage of streams, beaches and harbours. We are collecting information from pre-European times up until the present day. We're interested in everything from legends to the names of creeks, from the distance boats used to travel up stream to families who have been associated with development of the area.

Stream recovery assessment

The aim of this study is to see how quickly a stream recovers after a wastewater overflow. To assess this we are studying the Alexandra stream after there was a wastewater overflow. We'll return to the stream over a month or two and look at how quickly fish, macro-invertebrates (aquatic bugs), bacteria and the habitat return to normal.

Streamwalk

We had two people walking the length of around 15 streams on the North Shore. While walking the streams they collected information about the condition of the streams and what's living in them. 

They also collected information about the impacts that the stormwater and wastewater systems are having on the streams. They are also taking note of any structures that might be a barrier to fish moving up stream.

Ecological objectives

We used the information from the streamwalk to group as many streams as we can into four groups that reflect the quality of the stream. These groups are based on factors such as how natural the stream is and the amount of vegetation around the stream. Each of these four groups will have a set of ecological objectives that can be applied to them, below is a photo showing an example of a stream in each group. Below each photo is an example of the type of objective that could apply to a stream in that group.

Group one streams - Forested semi-natural

• A viable banded kokopu habitat

Group two streams - Urban semi modified

• Maintaining fish passage for banded kokopu and eels.

Group three streams - Urban modified

• Provide sufficient habitat for at least 3 fish species, which may include eels, inanga and bullies. 

Group four streams

• Maintain the environment sufficient for algae on the concrete streambeds and provide sufficient food for grazing invertebrates (fish food).

Specific stream strategies

Once we've collected as much information about our streams as we can we'll identify where we may be able to improve them. For each of these streams we'll look at developing a stream management strategy that will look at how we manage the stream to protect:

• heritage values;

• human use values; and

• stormwater uses.

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