Environmental Sustainability Model Essay

The Catchment Land Use for Environmental Sustainability model (CLUES), designed by the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research Ltd (NIWA), provided the data for both the Nitrogen and the Phosphorus concentrations throughout New Zealand. The development of CLUES was through a consolidation of existing mapping procedures and modelling(EnviroLink, 2012), and contributed to by various research organisations (NIWA, 2016). From this collaboration, the models responsible for the Nitrogen and Phosphorus concentrations are: OVERSEER®; the Soil Plant Atmosphere System Model (SPASMO); and Spatial Regional Regression on Watershed Attributes (SPARROW). The CLUES model calculates annual mean nutrient concentrations, based on the statistical relationship between the estimated mean average …show more content…
Wood et al. (2016), it is imperative that more monitoring programs and funding for research is directed towards New Zealand’s fresh water resources. The negative impacts of microcystin producing Cyanobacterial blooms are not only constrained to the production of the microcystin toxin. Impacts of algal blooms also affect aquatic ecosystems and organisms, by means of deoxygenation of the benthic areas (Robarts, Waiser, Arts, & Evans, 2005), and composition changes for species diversity, both aquatic and terrestrial (Aboal, Puig, Mateo, & Perona, 2002). Additionally, negative impacts stretch to terrestrial organisms as they are more susceptible to the associated toxins, with the LD50 for microcystin being 5-10 times lower (Catherine et al., 2013). Algal blooms also impact on drinking water supplies, not only though toxicity, but also through the release of odour compounds, such as geosmin and 2-methylisoborneol (Jähnichen, Jäschke, Wieland, Packroff, & Benndorf, 2011; Smith, Boyer, & Zimba, 2008; Watson,