[On-screen text: Every day, hundreds of people collect, monitor, and analyse water data from over 2000 sites across Victoria. This is how we manage one of our most vital resources.]
[Speaker: Paul Wilson]
What we have in Victoria's quite unique when you compare to other states in Australia. Normally a government department does a whole series of monitoring across the state. We use a different model where we have service providers come in and do all the monitoring for us.
[On-screen text: With help from our partner organisations, we're creating a detailed picture of the health of our water.]
[Speaker: Craig Mutton]
The partnerships themselves are long-standing collaboration with over 40 organisations with a requirement to collect water information from networks. They've been around for 20-odd years now.
[Speaker: Paul Wilson]
Surface water sites, we have around 850. Groundwater in the core sites, we have 1500. The site can either be visited monthly, which is the typical arrangement. Or if it's telemeted, that data is collected every 15 minutes and transferred every hour.
[Speaker: Craig Mutton]
You're improving how the data is collected in a consistent way across the state. We've got a single set of standards for collecting all information. That kind of thing has led to the state's data set as being a valued resource that's used internationally.
[On-screen text: Our data is essential to the work of policy-makers, water corporations, management authorities, and scientists.]
[Speaker: Hannah Sleeth]
The reason we collect data is because it informs policy and decision-making. A large part of that is we is do receive requests for data from different groups. I've had people from universities asking for data so that they can do their research. With water corporations, it can be to help them with their operations. Catchment management authorities have different projects on the go so it could be for environmental reasons.
[Speaker: Pat Liddell]
The data is important because without the data you don't really know what it is you're talking about. It's only through collecting the data, interpreting the data and applying the data that you can make judgments about what needs to be done. What doesn't need to be done. What's working well and what needs Improvement.
[On-screen text: Water data is an essential tool in helping us to understand the impacts of climate change.]
[Speaker: Paul Wilson]
If you don't have any data, you can't do any long-term planning any what they call scenario modelling and you can't look at climate change. A lot of the sites that we have will have 40 Years of flow data. The longer sites have a hundred years of continuous record and you need those long-term data sets to look at patterns and to look at trends.
[Speaker: Phill Dorward]
If we don't have those long-term records, we've got no idea what's going to happen with climate change. It all becomes a prediction. We need to monitor the change in the environment and how it's working. We need to understand the human impacts and how human impacts change the water quality.
Page last updated: 11/08/25