Leading scientists include TropWATER's Dr Cassandra James, Dr Zoe Bainbridge and Dr Stephen Lewis, in collaboration with the Water Quality and Investigations team, Department of the Environment, Tourism, Science and Innovation.

Collating 40 years of data

Over the past three years, JCU TropWATER catchment to reef research team have been digging deep into four decades of historical records, pulling together water quality datasets from across Great Barrier Reef catchment waterways. This includes technical reports, local hard drives, and long-forgotten folders deep inside TropWATER.

Altogether, we compiled over 26,000 water quality samples, bringing together 41 individual datasets – dating as far back as the 1990s. These records were then standardised to ensure all the different datasets could be compared and used together. It includes long-term records from the AIMS end-of-basin sampling program and Natural Heritage Trust projects in the Barron and Johnstone basins. More recent records include the National Environmental Science Program WQ Hub’s 'Project 25' dataset from the Russell Mulgrave and the Wet Tropics MIP (Terrain NRM) rainforest sites.

This compilation has just been published in Nature Data https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-025-04534-7.

The risk of losing these buried and unused water quality records

Decades of land use changes across the Great Barrier Reef catchment – from mining to agriculture and urban development – have left a clear mark on water quality. Fortunately, records were collected by organisations over the past 40 years, tracking changes in nutrients, sediment, metals and pesticides.

But this water quality monitoring data was at risk of being lost, with many datasets buried in grey-literature report appendices or stored on individual computer hard drives. This project has allowed us to collect these data and store it in a central, accessible platform – allowing us to understand long-term trends, guide future decisions, and make the most of existing investment.

Recovering and unifying this data will help scientists, managers, and policymakers make more informed decisions – grounded in a rich historical context that can’t be recreated.

Collaborators

This work is a collaboration with the DETSI Water Quality and Investigations (WQ&I) team, and the data are currently being loaded into the Tahbil water quality data portal (https://apps.des.qld.gov.au/water-data-portal/). These data will be publicly available alongside WQ&I’s GBR Catchments Loads Monitoring Program data – adding to this valuable resource for anyone working in this space. Our team are currently working with CSIRO and WQ&I to analyse some of the longer-term site datasets now available.

This project was funded by the Australian Government Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, and was managed by Andrew Moss, Department of the Environment, Tourism, Science and Innovation.

Images: McShane, Mann and Benney families.