Additional information and guidance related to water quality
The Water Quality Guidelines includes additional guidance to help users better understand our advice about guideline values for the community values of waterways in Australia and New Zealand.
Evaluating multiple pressures and stressors
Ideally, an assessment of lines of evidence should involve minimal best professional judgment so independent assessors can reach the same conclusions. Our guidance helps evaluate multiple lines of evidence in a weight of evidence assessment and provides evaluation methods for multiple pressures and stressors.
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Effects-based physical and chemical stressor guidance
Global interest is growing in the development of guideline values for physical and chemical (PC) stressors based on field-effects data or laboratory-effects data. Our default approach in the Water Quality Guidelines is to use reference-site data but we discuss new approaches, such as toxicity-based guideline values for salinity and dissolved oxygen.
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Groundwater guidance
Groundwater is an essential water resource for many aquatic, riparian and terrestrial ecosystems. Default Guideline Values for groundwater ecosystems have not been developed, but we have provided some general information and guidance on how the Water Quality Guidelines can apply to groundwater.
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Physical and chemical stressor guidance
Guidance provided on PC stressors is currently being updated for currency. It is based on the fact sheets and guideline packages in Volume 2 of the ANZECC & ARMCANZ (2000) guidelines.
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Stressors unrelated to water quality
When assessing water quality, you need to consider whether and how non-water quality related pressures and stressors might be contributing to or even driving changes to the system, particularly to biodiversity. Considering such pressures and stressors is critical so you can attribute measured responses of indicators to the correct cause.
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Protocols for biological assessment
Our protocols for biological assessment presents over 20 methods for sampling biological indicators including ecogenomics techniques. Most of the information has been taken from the ANZECC & ARMCANZ (2000) guidelines and updated for currency.
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