A collation of historical and contemporary water quality data from the freshwater reaches of surface streams within the Great Barrier Reef catchment area, northeastern Australia. The data includes 41 individual project datasets that collectively report 466 sites and contain over 26,000 discrete water quality sample records collected at a particular location and datetime stamp. The water quality data have been restricted to surface freshwater monitoring of total suspended solids, total and dissolved speciation of carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus, ionic composition (cations, anions), pesticide residues and trace metals. It also includes associated field and laboratory measured physical and chemical properties where they accompanied the above water quality datasets. Some case-by-case exceptions were made to ensure the ‘complete dataset’ was preserved (i.e., datasets which contained some estuarine sites). The identified datasets were subjected to a rigorous ‘cleaning process’ to highlight laboratory detection limits and methods as well as to convert data to standardised reporting units (James et al. 2025; https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-025-04534-7)

The data includes an MS Excel (.xlsx) file for each project containing 3 worksheets: a metadata statement related to the project, a site location lookup table and the water quality data related to that project. The metadata statements provide key information about the project, funding, key references, technical details, laboratory analysis methods and any relevant notes about the data. These statements also document any assumptions made regarding the data and any identified limitations. Users are expected to take into consideration this resource and the reference therein to determine the utility of data for their specific purpose. Users of this resource should cite both the data compilation manuscript (James et al. Submitted) and the relevant dataset references provided in the individual project meta-statements. A compilation of all the metadata statements is also provided as pdf which includes a table of contents, disclaimer and contact details, general laboratory method references and acronym definitions.

These data are also housed in the Microsoft Azure Data Platform and the associated public website Tahbil - Water Quality Data Portal (Water Quality & Investigations unit, Department of the Environment, Tourism, Science and Innovation) alongside Queensland Government water quality monitoring data from January 2025. It can be selected by including third-party data in the search criteria.

Software/equipment used to create/collect the data: Microsoft Excel

Software/equipment used to manipulate/analyse the data: R