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River ecology current state and trends in Tāmaki Makaurau /Auckland 2024. Data files

Author:  
Graham Surrey, Richard Storey
Source:  
Auckland Council Environmental Evaluation and Monitoring Unit, EEMU | Engineering, Assets and Technical Advisory Department
Publication date:  
2025
Topics:  
Environment

River ecology current state and trends in Tāmaki Makaurau / Auckland 2024. State of the environment reporting. 

Trends and state data files for Appendix A of the report, TR2025/28.

Trends data file download at the right.

State data file download

Executive summary (extract)

This report is one of a series of publications prepared in support of Te oranga o te taiao o Tāmaki Makaurau – The health of Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland’s Natural Environment in 2025.

This report presents the current state of river ecology in Tāmaki Makaurau / Auckland, assesses it against the relevant National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management (NPS-FM) 2020 National Objectives Framework (NOF) ecosystem health attributes, and explores how scores for the metrics used to assess river ecological health have changed over the past 10 to 15 years (the trend period for each metric depends on the dataset available).

The ecological health of rivers and streams can be affected by a variety of factors, including the types of land use activities within their catchments, diffuse and point-source discharges, erosion, as well as climatic variability.

Auckland Council’s River Ecology Monitoring Programme involves sampling aquatic macroinvertebrates (stream insects) at 63 sites throughout the Auckland region on an annual basis, as well as undertaking Stream Ecological Valuation (SEV) assessments that incorporate measures of biophysical and habitat quality. Seven of these 63 sites are native forest reference sites, which provide a baseline for ‘undisturbed’ catchments against which sites within different land-uses can be compared.

This field data is then used to calculate several metrics, including the Macroinvertebrate Community Index (MCI), Quantitative Macroinvertebrate Community Index (QMCI), and SEV score. ...  

 

Auckland Council technical report, TR2025/28

September 2025

See also

Te oranga o te taiao o Tāmaki Makaurau. The health of Tāmaki Makaurau / Auckland’s natural environment in 2025. A synthesis of Auckland Council’s state of the environment reporting



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