Essential Monitor’s Guide for Prairie Water Retention

The document outlines a framework for monitoring water retention projects in the Prairies, emphasizing the need for water and contaminant mass balances to evaluate performance. It details a range of monitoring tools—from low-cost metre sticks to expensive automated samplers—and explains how to use rating curves to estimate discharge. The guide highlights the importance of high-frequency data to capture rapid hydrologic events and suggests using monitoring data to develop hydraulic and water-quality treatment models for improving future site design and management.

• Water retention projects act as natural infrastructure providing benefits including flood and drought mitigation, water quality improvement, carbon storage, and enhanced biodiversity.
• Monitoring is essential to verify that projects meet specifications over time and to provide the long-term data necessary to optimize the design and management of future sites, particularly in colder regions like the Canadian Prairies where performance differs from warmer climates.
• Effective performance assessment requires understanding both the water balance (tracking surface runoff, groundwater, and evapotranspiration) and the contaminant mass balance (tracking the mass of constituents like phosphorus and nitrogen).
• To reduce costs and increase flexibility, monitors can use rating curves to estimate water discharge based on high-frequency water-level data from hydraulic structures like culverts, weirs, and spillways, rather than relying solely on expensive automated flow-measurement equipment.
• Low sampling frequencies can lead to significant underestimations of nutrient loads because peak concentrations during snowmelt and rainfall events can occur rapidly and be missed by manual sampling.
• The International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) employs a tiered equipment strategy, using automated samplers for sequential or composite sampling to calibrate models, while maintaining manual sampling for complex phosphorus forms like orthophosphate that require rapid stabilization.
• Monitoring data can be used to create coupled hydraulic and water-quality treatment models, which allow practitioners to simulate different hydrologic scenarios and assess how changes in design or management affect 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} }