Wetlands&Science

 The 2016 New Zealand Freshwater Sciences Society ( NZFSS )  conference was held in Invercargill, Southland from 5 to 8th of December 2016. The conference was themed ‘Freshwater on the edge’ which reflects the push towards the edge of our scientific knowledge, including the scientific innovation to maintain and restore the health of some of our special freshwater resources. I presented my latest work on modelling in the conference session “Wetlands” on: “The effectiveness of a natural wetland in removing nitrate loads” The performance of a small natural pastoral seepage wetland was studied in the headwaters of the Toenepi catchment, Kiwitahi, Waikato from 2011 to 2013. A simple dynamic model operating on an hourly time step was used to explore potential wetland nitrate removal performance. Hourly measurements of inflow, outflow, rainfall and Penman evapotranspiration estimates were used to calculate dynamic water balance for the wetland. In addition, n...

I had the opportunity to attend four day course on uncertainty in modelling with PEST which was followed by 1,5 day workshop from 4th of April to 8thod April in Christchurch.   The course was led by Dr. John Doherty, the developer of PEST. Course was very intensive hands-on modelling and performing uncertainty analysis. The course gave very useful and practical knowledge about modelling and related issues. The 1.5 day was attended by 30 water resource scientists and managers from regional authorities, universities, research organisations and consultancies to better understand the reasons why predictions made by environmental models are often accompanied by wide margins of uncertainty.  Workshop presentations were given by Chris Daughney (GNS Science), John Doherty (Watermark Numerical Computing), Linda Lilburn (Landcare Research), Graham McBride (NIWA), Stephen McNeill (Landcare Research), Catherine Moore (GNS Science/ESR), David Scott (ESR), Shailesh Kumar Singh...