Bellinger River Health Program 2017-2020: DPIE Science Water quality and Macroinvertebrate data

In response to the strong community interest in the Bellinger River turtle population, and a publicly perceived link between turtle mortality and poor water quality, a citizen science program was developed in 2017. This is now known as Bellingen Riverwatch, a high resolution, long-term community led water quality monitoring program, covering the Bellinger and Kalang rivers and their tributaries. Initial discussions with stakeholders identified a strong community interest and investment in river health. It was also identified that, in order to maximise the effectiveness of information collected by the community, a concurrent scientific monitoring program be developed to provide quality assurance and to utilise the community data when reporting. In support of Riverwatch the government-based Bellinger River Health Program (BRHP) was commenced in 2017 by the Estuaries and Catchments Team in the Water, Wetlands and Coasts Science Branch in the Environment, Energy and Science Division of DPIE. (formerly OEH). This dataset is the water quality and aquatic macroinvertebrate data collected for the BRHP by the DPIE Estuaries and Catchments Team. It includes the water quality data collected for the program between autumn 2017 and autumn 2020 and macroinvertebrate data collected from autumn 2018 to autumn 2020. While there were macroinvertebrate samples collected in 2017 quality control and assurance analysis unfortunately led to removal of these samples from the data set.