  Negative environmental impacts on societies and ecosystems are frequently
driven by human activity and amplified by increasing climatic variability.
Properly managing these impacts relies on a government's ability to ensure
environmental regulatory compliance in the face of increasing uncertainty.
Water flow rates are the most widely used evaluation metric for river
regulatory compliance. Specifically, compliance thresholds are set by
calculating the minimum flow rates required by aquatic species such as fish.
These are then designated as the minimum "environmental flows" (eflows) for
each river. In this paper, we explore how IoT-generated open government data
can be used to enhance the development of an automated IoT-based eflows
compliance system. To reduce development and operational costs, the proposed
solution relies on routinely collected river monitoring data. Our approach
allows for any authority with similar data to rapidly develop, test and verify
a scalable solution for eflow regulatory compliance monitoring and evaluation.
Furthermore, we demonstrate a real-world application of our system using open
government data from Estonia's national river monitoring network. The main
novelty of this work is that the proposed IoT-based system provides a simple
evaluation tool that re-purposes IoT-generated open government data to evaluate
compliance and improve monitoring at a national scale. This work showcases a
new paradigm of IoT-based solutions using open government data and provides a
real-world example of how the solution can automatically evaluate environmental
compliance in increasingly uncertain environments.
