Creekwatch set to improve Townsville waterways

Good science is based on good data, and there’s no better community to contribute to good fisheries management than the recreational fishing community.

Creekwatch is a community awareness and citizen science program established by Townsville City Council, and is designed to encourage community members to participate in fish monitoring. By doing so, locals grow their knowledge and capacity, and help fill data gaps and improve their understanding of waterway health.

Recently, we caught up with Nathan Frisby, Northern Queensland Program Manager, who is leading the program and is personally motivated to make sure his local waterways are better today, then they were yesterday.

What is Creekwatch to you?

OzFish has been running the Creekwatch program since early 2021. During this time, our project team, supported by a core group of volunteers, has been implementing weekly monitoring of waterways around Townsville.

Creekwatch activities are presently undertaken at 14 waterways across the Townsville region. One waterway is monitored each week and the sampling effort is repeated quarterly for each sampling location. Some systems, such as Crystal Creek and Middle Ross River, have received additional monitoring as part of the school-based Creekwatch activities. We also monitor one waterway on Magnetic Island (Gustav Creek).

What are our goals?

Our regular activities include sampling, fish surveys, and water quality monitoring of local creeks and wetlands, and we also conduct litter clean-ups and riparian assessments of locations. With this in mind, the main goals of Creekwatch are to establish the health of these systems, and empower the community to get involved and see what organisms are living in their local creeks. The more we know, the more inclined we are to give back and participate in restoration efforts.

What are we achieving?

A lot of the data we are seeing is allowing us to report back to Townsville City Council and highlight areas that need attention. This could be due to noticing an increase in invasive species, a decline in the riparian vegetation, a decline in water quality or even the macroinvertebrate (small critters without backbones) score is too low for an area in which it was previously higher.

When it’s all said and done, the data which we are collecting will be used to inform improving or maintaining certain waterways within Townsville. 

What does this mean for the fish?

Creekwatch gives us the opportunity to understand what is living in our waterways. For us, 90 per cent of the monitoring is conducted in freshwater systems with new saltwater surveys happening in the next few weeks. It allows us to understand these systems at a level in which some people, especially recreational fishermen, sometimes forget about.

In order for them to catch the iconic species, like barramundi, we have here in North Queensland, they need to have these healthy catchments to migrate up into. Distinct variation in fish species diversity has been observed in some locations, and these differences can be attributed to a range of environmental factors, their proximity to urban development, and their position within the catchment.  So, in short, if we want to keep seeing these amazing fish in our waterways it’s important we are monitoring across all levels and noticing any changes promptly. 

How can people get involved?

People can find us and our work by clicking here. We also have a very active Facebook group called Creekwatch Townsville where events and interesting information are posted each week. We are always looking for more people to join us on our monitoring days, so come on down and help us, help our environment!