Guest Author • Nov 11, 2016 •
By Bill Laurance, James Cook University and Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University Life has existed on Earth for roughly 3.7 billion years. During that time we know of five mass extinction events — dramatic episodes when many, if not most, life forms vanished in a geological heartbeat. The most recent of these was the global … Read More
Guest Author • Nov 10, 2016 •
By Ninah Kopel, The Conversation Well-intended efforts to reduce food waste could threaten some birds and animal species, a new paper has warned. Writing in the journal Animal Conservation, researchers have called for scientists to consider how food efficiency measures may affect animal populations that rely on landfill and other food waste to survive. The warning comes … Read More
Kimberley Collins • Aug 22, 2016 •
The New Zealand Landcare Trust has launched ‘An Inventory of Citizen Science in New Zealand‘ to understand what’s happening in the citizen science space. An Inventory of Citizen Science, which was published earlier this month. The inventory, written by Dr. Monica Peters, includes a range of projects studying everything from children monitoring long-tailed bats, to patrolling beaches for dead seabirds and monitoring … Read More
Laura Goodall • Aug 18, 2016 •
Letting people harvest New Zealand’s protected wood pigeon can create a win-win outcome for all, says conservationist Len Gillman. Len Gillman For centuries, Māori carefully managed and harvested kererū as an important food source. As kaitiaki (environmental guardians), communities will place a rāhui (temporary ban) on specific animals or plants if numbers get too low, to allow them to recover. This mātauranga Māori (indigenous knowledge) dates back to well … Read More
John Kerr • Jul 18, 2016 •
The Government funds millions of dollars’ worth of conservation and environment research each year – and it needs your help to make sure that research is heading in the right direction. A planned conservation and environment science ‘roadmap’ will lay out the Government’s research priorities of for the next 20 years. The Department of Conservation (DOC) and Ministry for the Environment (MfE) have jointly … Read More
Laura Goodall • Jun 09, 2016 •
It’s Matariki, a sacred time for Māori that’s named after a specific star cluster. For Waikato astronomy researcher Dr Rangi Mātāmua, traditional Māori star knowledge and Western science are not enemies but allies. His latest project uses historic star lore to shed light on modern environmental issues – and is also a deeply personal quest that began with a dying … Read More
Erica Mather • May 20, 2016 •
As thick heavy fuel oil washed ashore in the wake of the Rena grounding on the Astrolabe reef, smothering beaches and birds along the Bay of Plenty coast, public outrage mounted. Intense media coverage put pressure on environmental managers to answer difficult questions: what was the extent of the impact? How long would it take for the marine environment … Read More
Guest Author • May 11, 2016 •
By Ivy Shih, The Conversation Virtual reality technology is introducing a new dimension to wildlife conservation by helping researchers anywhere in the world assess the conditions of distant species and environments as if they were on location. The first application has been to better understand the environment of endangered jaguars living in the Peruvian Amazon. This information is … Read More
Marie Brown • Mar 24, 2016 •
New Zealand’s indigenous biodiversity is in crisis – a crisis of state and trend, a crisis of governance and a crisis of public engagement – because the fundamental drivers of loss have not been addressed. What follows is the vision articulated in Vanishing Nature to bring solutions together and identify progress in communicating it. New Zealand has … Read More
Peter Griffin • Mar 07, 2016 •
I took incredible pleasure in slowly working through Simon Winchester’s new book Pacific, which serves as a sort of companion piece to his 2010 effort Atlantic. And what better a place to delve into a book about the world’s greatest ocean than in the middle of that ocean – Tahiti, where I was lucky enough to spend a week recently, with … Read More