GWD Talk: Monitoring – an important component in water resources management

Monitoring is an important part of life, from the mundane to the explicit and intricate monitoring done in research, business and management. It includes the observations that it may be a colder winter than last year, or the fact that increasing age does not allow you quite the range of motion and activity that you used to do. It is carried out in a business setting, in finances, in hospitals and in water resources management. Very often these observations form part of our memories, which tends to become blurred with time. Keeping a record of the observations and measurements helps to provide a record that can be used for proper management decisions. The American statistician, William Edwards Deming (1900-1993), once said: 

“You cannot manage what you cannot measure”.

This emphasises the significance of quantification within a system before implementation of management and mitigation measures. So, if monitoring is so important, there should be a lot of monitoring taking place. Right? This is, unfortunately, not the case. There are a number of questions regarding monitoring, which includes:

• Why do we monitor water resources? 

• How do we monitor water resources?

• When to monitor?

• What to monitor?

• Who should do the monitoring?

• Where to do monitoring?

• How do you develop a monitoring network?

There are some constraints around monitoring and managing a monitoring network that complicate matters. This talk will address this and the questions above. It will briefly touch on how to record monitoring data, but the management of the data and how to turn data into information will have to wait for another time.