About This Course

This course is designed to allow flexible learning for people who are engaged in the water quality sector and who want to ensure they can get the maximum beneficial use from the output of water quality monitoring programmes. Planning for water quality data management is often overlooked at the monitoring programme design phase. However, without good data management and communication of monitoring results, the effort and resources used to collect the data may be wasted. This course highlights the importance of good practice for handling water quality data, and presents some options for their storage, management and interpretation. Key approaches to statistical analysis and visualisation of water quality data are described with reference to relevant commercial and free on-line software. The long-term benefits of collecting water quality data are described in the context of appropriate data security and effective data sharing and collaboration.