| Title | Twenty-Five Years of Geothermal Monitoring by Waikato Regional Council: Embracing Change, Collaboration, and Innovation |
|---|---|
| Authors | K. Luketina and J. McLeod |
| Year | 2020 |
| Conference | New Zealand Geothermal Workshop |
| Keywords | geothermal, monitoring, RMA, PSInSar |
| Abstract | Waikato Regional Council (WRC) has a statutory obligation under the Resource Management Act 1991 to monitor the state of the regional geothermal environment, keep records, and make those records available to the public. Therefore, WRC undertakes geophysical, geochemical, and ecological monitoring of the region’s geothermal environment, stores the data in a variety of databases depending on the data type, interprets the data and publishes reports in several media for different audiences. The WRC website provides environmental articles for a lay audience, Technical Reports, environmental indicators, and downloadable data. Papers are publicly available through the International Geothermal Association (IGA) papers database and through other open-access journals. Monitoring is undertaken to determine the natural state of the regional geothermal resource, its variability, any trends and to identify any anthropogenic changes. This informs the policy development, resource allocation and organisation decision making processes to ensure that the resource is managed sustainably. Monitoring is funded through resource consent holder annual charges and the general rate levied on regional landowners. This small income stream is augmented by collaboration with and support of other research bodies such as Crown Research Institutes (CRIs) and universities who have central government research grants. WRC researchers have had significant success in developing or supporting the development of new monitoring techniques including remote sensing technology to provide system-wide and multi-system monitoring as well as interaction with groundwater and surface water, geothermal ecologies and the gradation from geothermal to non-geothermal environment. Change is constant in our monitoring programmes as we embrace new information-gathering technologies, data collection, storage, retrieval, analysis and interpretation applications, and communication media. Collaboration with tangata whenua on Matauranga Maori physical and meta-physical monitoring is becoming more and more a part of what we do. |