The Ministry for the Environment’s ‘Freshwater Reform 2013 and Beyond’ document suggests an approach of assigning values to attributes for selected waterbodies, with ranges of values presented as ‘bands’. The aim of using bands is to assess the long-term likelihood of a water body to present a health risk from cyanobacteria, not to detect short-duration bloom events. These events should be managed following the outline in the New Zealand Guidelines for Managing Cyanobacteria in Recreational Fresh Waters (Ministry for the Environment and Ministry of Health 2009).