Continuous Water Quality Monitoring (CWQM) Instruments Database

Brief description

Continuous Water Quality Monitoring (CWQM) refers to the application of in situ instrumentation coupled with operational and analytical methodologies that enable acquisition of temporally and (or) spatially dense datasets without the need for routine collection and analysis of physical samples other than for periodic calibration purposes.

This data collection contains the results of an evaluation of commercially available CWM instruments for deployment in Queensland estuarine and marine settings. The instruments were evaluated on criteria which included (i) utility of analyte to both modelling and monitoring requirements, (ii) ability to
measure analyte concentrations accurately and capture relevant temporal and spatial variability, (iii) cost, both capital and ongoing operational, (iv) logistics, including maintenance requirements, mounting, telemetry infrastructure and site access, and (v) ease of instrument operation and the required effort for information to be understood and applied.

This information was used to inform the strategy for implementing a CWQM program to support the eReefs research platform (please refer to the linked publication for details)

Important Disclaimer
The information contained in this datasets includes general statements based on scientific research and on evaluation of instruments as they were at a particular point in time for a specific set of purposes. This information may be obsolete, incomplete or unable to be used in any specific situation. Reuse it at your own risk.
Lineage: The CWQM Instruments Database was originally published as a subsection of the TERN Australian Coastal Ecosystems Facility (ACEF) website at a URL of http://acef.tern.org.au/wqtech/. The database records were create on September 24th, 2014 and so the instrument information is only current for that date.

This website was based on the Drupal 7 Content Management System (CMS) and the database was implemented using a mix of Drupal entity types, including taxonomies, fieldsets and custom content types. The files in this data collection have been created by exporting data from that website in tabular formats, editing some column names for readability, and updating the CWQM Instrument Image filenames to be readable. The exports were performed on 2024-12-03, using a backup of the ACEF website database created at the time the website was decommissioned in July 2024.

The data files are:
CWQM-Instruments-Database.xlsx - contains multiple worksheets, one for each Drupal entity which made up the database. Each worksheet has a single header-row.

CWQM-Instrument-Manufacturers.csv, CWQM-Instrument-Parameters.csv, CWQM-Instruments.csv, CWQM-Interfaces.csv and CWQM-Parameters.csv are all UTF-8-encoded exports from the CWQM-Instruments-Database.xlsx spreadsheet in comma-separated-variables (CSV) format, one file per worksheet. All CSV files have a single header-row.

The CWQM-Instruments-Images image gallery contains an image of each of the instruments in the database (see the CWQM Instruments worksheet/csv file for which filename goes with which instrument). Copyright and credit for these images should be attributed to the manufacturer of the instrument in question.