BARKANDJI rangers from throughout the Far West gathered in Kinchega National Park last week to complete their Certificate II in water sampling as part of a Ngarratja Warrkina Project.
The project was organised by the Barkandji Prescriber Body Corporate, the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water and the Environmental Protection Authority as part of the Darling Baaka Flood Recovery Program.
Senior team leader of Estuaries & Catchments at the DCCEEW, Dr Kathryn Korbe, led the training.
Giving local rangers the skills to be more capable of capturing water immediately in response to a water event would be of huge benefit to understanding the health of the Darling Baaka, she said.
“We’ll now have faster capability to take water samples and measure water quality,” she said.
“So in times of events like a flood of fish death, rangers will have local capability.”
Dr Korbel said thirty-five sites have been set up along the river to monitor river health each month, and each site is assessed based on indicators relating to geomorphology, biology and biodiversity.
She said that the Barkandji rangers at the training were thoroughly knowledgeable about the river already which made them ideal candidates to gain more skills and learn to collect water samples for data.
“These guys live here, they live and breathe the river,” she said.
“They know the issues and so now they will be able to come down and take samples and send them back to the labs where we can analyse them scientifically to get the results out.”
Senior ranger Max Quayle said that it made sense to have Barkandji rangers on the ground collecting water rather than waiting on scientists a thousand kilometres away.
“We’ll all be accredited to collect these samples on the ground and it won’t take a week or two for someone to get here, when the water has already changed so much,” he said.
“It’ll be great to be able to keep it in town.”
Dr Korbel said that eleven rangers attended from Wilcannia, Wentworth, Broken Hill and Menindee.
“It’s one of the first times we’ve got all the rangers together, so it’s very exciting to see everyone down here,” she said.
