Essential Monitor’s Guide for Prairie Water Retention

The 'Essential Monitor’s Guide for Prairie Water Retention' is a technical guidebook published by the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) in February 2024. It provides a framework for monitoring the water quantity and quality of water retention projects—natural infrastructure designed for flood and drought mitigation, water quality improvement, and biodiversity enhancement. The guide details the necessity of water and contaminant mass balances, recommends specific monitoring tools and equipment, and explains how to use rating curves and automated samplers to collect data in the challenging environments of the Canadian Prairies.

• Water retention projects serve as natural infrastructure providing multiple benefits, including flood and drought mitigation, water quality improvement, carbon storage, and enhanced biodiversity. Monitoring is essential to verify that these projects perform to their design specifications and to maintain that performance over time.
• Effective monitoring requires establishing both a water balance and a contaminant mass balance. The water balance tracks the quantity of water entering and exiting the site, including surface runoff, groundwater, and evapotranspiration. The contaminant mass balance integrates this with concentration data for constituents like nitrogen and phosphorus to determine the total mass of pollutants reduced by the site.
• To reduce the high cost and inflexibility of automated flow-measurement equipment, the guide recommends using rating curves. These curves allow monitors to estimate discharge based on water levels, which are cheaper and easier to monitor at high frequency, particularly at hydraulic structures like culverts, weirs, and spillways.
• The guide highlights the risks of relying solely on manual water-quality sampling due to the unpredictable timing of snowmelt and rainfall events. It suggests three automated sampling configurations: sequential sampling (for specific moments in time), composite sampling (for average variability), and flow proportional composite sampling (for accurate total loading).
• Monitoring in prairie landscapes faces specific challenges, including 'backwater effects' where downstream water levels influence upstream flow, particularly in culverts. Additionally, monitors must account for 'short-circuits' in flow paths and natural obstructions such as beaver dams.
• High-quality monitoring data can be used to develop coupled hydraulic and water-quality treatment models. These models help assess how parameters like water depth and temperature influence water quality and allow for the simulation of different design or management scenarios to maximize site performance.

APA

Simoes, J., & Grosshans, R. (2024). Essential Monitor’s Guide for Prairie Water Retention. International Institute for Sustainable Development. https://www.iisd.org/system/files/2024-02/monitors-guide-prairie-water-retention.pdf

Chicago

Simoes, Joey, and Richard Grosshans. Essential Monitor’s Guide for Prairie Water Retention. International Institute for Sustainable Development, 2024. https://www.iisd.org/system/files/2024-02/monitors-guide-prairie-water-retention.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |last1=Simoes |first1=Joey |last2=Grosshans |first2=Richard |title=Essential Monitor’s Guide for Prairie Water Retention |publisher=International Institute for Sustainable Development |date=February 2024 |url=https://www.iisd.org/system/files/2024-02/monitors-guide-prairie-water-retention.pdf |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{simoes2024essential, author = {Simoes, Joey and Grosshans, Richard}, title = {{Essential Monitor’s Guide for Prairie Water Retention}}, institution = {International Institute for Sustainable Development}, year = {2024}, month = feb, url = {https://www.iisd.org/system/files/2024-02/monitors-guide-prairie-water-retention.pdf}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }