What we've seen here um, is that there is you know a whole bunch of restoration gone on here with riparian fencing and planting.

The local landowner has bought the fences right back to exclude stock, the planting is going really well, and now we're looking at taking it to the next step where we can um, start to improve fish passage, get more spawning for the Whitebait species which are here as inaka.

Yeah very much so.

I mean, anywhere where you've got you know, throughout all of New Zealand actually, anywhere where you've got farmland adjacent to you know estuaries and lowland rivers, historically the farmers have been worried about land inundation and one of the mains ways of managing that, is through tidal gates and flood gates.

Yeah i mean, i think the two aren't mutually exclusive, you can do both, and certainly what we're wanting to do here is we're installing water level monitoring gear, and all of the water quality gear that goes along with it as well.

And the idea there is that we can actually show farmers, these are the environmental outcomes that we can achieve, and this was the impact on the farms.

And so, it might be that there's no impact, and we can show that, and we can take that out to the rest of New Zealand and say you know, you can do this.

We've got this, you know this gear that we've got here, you can set alarms on it so in real time if the water level gets to a level that would worry a farmer, they get an alarm and we know we need to modify the gates we've got here, um you know to look after that property.

No not at all, and not, especially not with this newer technology that comes through.

So this water level recorder here, um you know, two or three years ago to install one like that that could communicate in real time would be about ten thousand dollars.

Uh that unit there is seven hundred.

This one has just got, um, a little cell phone card in it and um every hour it will beam out, um, and then we can look at a webpage.

We've got four of these along through the catchment here and we can look at a webpage to see what the water levels are doing.

When the challenge up until now has been the telemetry side of things in real time being able to understand what would happen.

Whereas before you would have to, um, say with those old oxygen loggers there as well, to get the data off that I have to manually go and download it.

So the telemetry technology that comes with this, um has been a real game changer.