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Release of Te Ao Māori climate change report

He huringa āhuarangi, he huringa ao: a changing climate, a changing world

Manpreet Dhami working in the mobile lab

Swapping time for space to track the impact of microbes on climate change

Whether soils lose or gain carbon under warming temperatures remains one of the significant unknowns in climate change studies. In breakt...

Cultures in petri dishes. Image: Shara van der Pas, CC BY-SA

The world is desperate for new antibiotics, and New Zealand’s unique fungi are a source of promising compounds

One of the earliest antibiotics ever discovered, penicillin, originally came from a fungus. Mycologists are now studying the contents of ...

mirror lakes climate change

Conservation and climate change

Island systems, such as New Zealand, are hotspots of endemic species found nowhere else – some 80% of vascular plants, 86% of molluscs, 8...

  1. Our contribution to environmental reporting for Aotearoa New Zealand – the story so far

    Since 2015, research organisations across New Zealand have contributed to a growing national cache of environmental reporting data under the 2015 Environmental Reporting Act, which brought into existence the requirement for cyclic national environmental ‘domain’ reports. This means the Ministry for ...

  2. Reconstructing long-term climate change

    Long-term palaeoecological and climate reconstructions provide baseline information to show how species and ecosystems have responded to climate change and human activities in the past. These palaeo-archives are increasingly being used to help inform conservation management plans and policies, incre...

  3. Future drought could drain primary sector profit

    New research has found that more intense future drought is likely to lead to drops in farm profit.

  4. New way to map pasture productivity

    Researchers have used remote sensing techniques to produce a national scale map of pasture productivity for New Zealand.

  5. A first for on-farm carbon certification

    Lake Hawea Station has been named as the first farm in New Zealand to have a carbon footprint certified by environmental certifications provider Toitū Envirocare, a subsidiary of Manaaki Whenua.

  6. A moth to a flame: species survival against the odds

    On 29 August 2020, a fire began near the Pūkaki Scientific Reserve in the South Island’s Mackenzie district. Fuelled by wilding pines, the fire burned through more than 3,000 hectares of drought-dry land on the shore of Lake Pūkaki, and destroyed most of the reserve.

  7. Getting to the root causes of soil erosion using high-res remote sensing

    Soil erosion processes are notably active in New Zealand: our steep slopes, generally weak sedimentary rocks, and high annual rainfall totals including frequent large rainfall events, underscored by a history of vegetation clearance for agriculture, mean that around 192 million tonnes of soil on agr...

  8. Celebrating our achievements

    Manaaki Whenua has two new Royal Society Te Apārangi Fellows.

  9. Towards a national strategy for soil

    Why a soil strategy? After all, we have spent a few decades now in the absence of a strategic direction. As often plays out, urgency of fundamental information occurs during times of policy or management decisions being made. However, once the decision is made, the pressure goes off and the perceive...

  10. What effects must be avoided, remediated or mitigated to maintain indigenous biodiversity?

    New Zealand’s indigenous biodiversity is unique and complex, and it is declining and threatened. People and companies are often uncertain about what they should or should not do to help maintain it. A new paper sets out some comprehensive and concise criteria to provide guidance on what biodiversity...
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