## Swimmable Rivers data E Coli counts and swimmable categories from the National Rivers Water Quality Network New Zealand Government Clean Water Package 2017 

### Description

In March 2017, the National Government announced a consultation over it's proposed [Clean Water package 2017](http://www.mfe.govt.nz/fresh-water/freshwater-management-reforms/clean-water-package-2017).

The package proposed a revised definition of the 'swimmability' of rivers and lakes. The base data were E coli counts from river sampling sites in New Zealand's National Rivers Water Quality Network. The counts were transformed into lengths of river segments (reachs) and the reachs were binned into five categories. 

The package included a headline announcement that there would be a 'target', [90% of rivers and lakes would be swimmable by 2040](http://www.mfe.govt.nz/node/22969). The target would be calculated on the basis of lengths of river reachs. The current 'baseline', in lengths of river reachs, was that 72% were 'swimmable'. 

On 15 March 2017, I asked the Ministry for the Environment for the underlying sampling data from the water quality monitoring sites ("https://fyi.org.nz/request/5549-clean-water-2017-analysis-of-water-quality-monitoring-sites-making-up-the-water-quality-categories-expressed-in-lengths-of-rivers-swimmable-in-report-me-1293).

On 5 July 2017, after a complaint to the Office of the Ombudsmen, I was emailed the relevant data in .rdata format. I created this repository to provide a permanent and open home for the data.

### Contents

The repository holds the data in .rdata format, the data in .csv format and a very short R script file.

WQdailymeansEcoli.rdata

WQdailymeansEcoli.csv

WQ-daily-means-Ecoli.r