Environment Bay of Plenty is planning to spend nearly $0.75 million over the next few years to improve its ability to monitor groundwater use.

The money is the council response to a recent reassessment of ground water monitoring that found that more knowledge is required, as demand for water increases.
More robust science is needed to determine the quality and quantity of available water, environmental scientist Janine Barber told the regional council's monitoring committee.
The regional council needs to monitor pressure changes, water quality and rainfall recharge to groundwater systems.
The information will help determine how much water is going in, how much is taken out and whether there will be enough water to allocate to users.
The council wants to protect the needs of existing users, and to ensure there is enough for further use.
There is also some risk of saltwater intrusion into the water system, and more monitoring will give an early indication of the first signs, particularly at Matakana Island, and at Papamoa Beach near the Kaituna River, says Janine.
The existing groundwater monitoring network provides useful baseline data, but with increasing regional development – and the need to ensure that water is allocated and used efficiently – this network is no longer sufficient, says Janine.
This is in part because it is based on private bores being used for groundwater extraction, and some of these are not always in the right area or at the depths needed to adequately monitor the groundwater system.
The shortcomings will be dealt with by EBOP installing its own monitoring equipment, including bores that target source aquifers at different depths, and monitoring stations that include rainfall recorders and soil moisture monitoring to determine how rain is recharging underground aquifer systems.