On Wednesday, September 25th, Porirua City Council (PCC) and Mountains to Sea Wellington (MTSW) hosted a morning session to showcase and celebrate the amazing community groups that have contributed a year's worth of monitoring for the Citizen Science Program in Porirua.
In August of 2023, following on from an awesome riparian planting season some of our keen community groups working across Te Awarua-o-Porirua came together and signed themselves up to take part in the Porirua Citizen Science monitoring program. Our community members took part in some group training sessions to learn and understand how to use a Stream Health Monitoring Assessment Kit (SHMAK) preparing them to monitor their local awa.
Thirteen community groups/members have taken part in the monitoring program to date, collecting quarterly monitoring data for the past year with the support of PCC and MTSW coordinators. Each community group monitors at least one stream, with some groups monitoring up to three stream sites! These amazing volunteers monitor from up in the hills of Pāuatahanui down to the streams in Wai-o-Hata, and all the way from Tītahi Bay to Glenside. This community based monitoring helps local council and community to paint a picture of what is happening in our waterways that feed into Te Awarua-o-Porirua. It also provides groups with the skills to monitor their waterways to understand if their riparian plantings are impacting the stream health and it empowers community groups to call and plan for action if there is an identifiable issue of degradation in their awa.
After a full year of data collection, our curious community groups were eager to understand what their data means and what next steps to take in their restoration and monitoring journey. Joining our lovely community volunteers at our workshop were some of our friends from Wellington City Council, Wellington Water, Greater Wellington Regional Council, and Porirua Harbour Trust.
We kicked off the day with an awesome presentation from Russleigh Parai (Ngāti Toa Rangatira) a kaupapa māori scientist at ESR. Russleigh shared with us the work Ngāti Toa Rangatira and ESR have been leading in Te Awarua-o-Porirua, the project has been largely focussed on grab sampling of cockles, collecting them in the harbor for fecal contamination (E. Coli), most recently they have created a passive sampling device which they have deployed in the harbor and in six freshwater streams throughout Porirua to monitor E. Coli. Te Awarua-o-Porirua is not only important to the local community but it is an area of cultural, historical, spiritual, and traditional significance to Ngāti Toa Rangatira.
Baillie Graham from PCC presented on the communities collected data, highlighting some trends and key issues in each of the monitoring sites across the Porirua catchment. With the best results for ecosystem health up in hills Pāuatahanui, in contrast to poor ecosystem health and habitat values found in Tītahi Bay. The stark contrasts between waterway health throughout the catchment is likely due to many factors, but the urban environment of many of our awa in Porirua is often impacting the health of our waterways. Many groups, like the Kahotea Stream Restoration Group are already planting out and restoring the edge of this stream in Tītahi Bay, however, the impacts of their planting efforts are not likely to show up for another 10 years. Stream restoration is not a fast-fix and this work is intergenerational, but providing communities with the knowledge and capability to monitor and take restorative action now will hopefully empower these local communities to continue to kaitiaki these awa for many years to come.
We then settled into some workshopping and brainstorming for some practical actions that both our community groups and our strategic partners can take over the next 12 months to begin or continue restoration work or provide further learning opportunities for our volunteers! Some of those actions include riparian planting projects, fish and biodiversity monitoring of our waterways, community events to share knowledge and engage the wider community, and continuing to share learnings and insights from the monitoring. We look forward to continuing to support PCC’s citizen scientists and their mahi as we roll out year 2 of this project!
A special thanks to Baillie Graham (PCC) and Abbey Huriwai (MTSW) who have contributed so much to the Citizen Science project to date and for organising this workshop event for our Porirua community! If you want to join the Citizen Science monitoring programme in Porirua flick Baillie (baillie.graham@poriruacity.govt.nz) an email and get in touch!
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