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2020 News

  1. Nationally threatened bat species discovered in Morrinsville

    The long-tailed bat (pekapeka whiore roa) has made a surprise appearance in Morrinsville in the Waikato.

  2. Pacific Soils Portal officially launched this week

    For decades, soil scientists from Manaaki Whenua – Landcare Research have been visiting Pacific Island Countries and Territories (PICTs) to collect soil samples and map soil patterns. The work is vital to help decision-makers improve their soils knowledge and land-management practices. Now, soil map...

  3. Myrtle rust update: Mature native trees now dying

    The first known case of mature tree death due to myrtle rust infection has been observed in the East Cape of Aotearoa New Zealand, suggesting localised extinction for some native myrtles could become a reality.

  4. Expanding our S-map soil mapping capability

    Govt. makes $6.25m investment in mapping NZ’s most valuable soils, saying they are vital to our economic, environmental and social wellbeing.

  5. Science NZ Awards 2020

    The annual Science New Zealand awards recognise achievements in three categories: Early Career Researcher, Team, and Lifetime or Individual Achievement.

  6. Machine recognition helping to catch trap-shy predators

    MW scientists have been contributing to a national “Products to Projects” initiative, coordinated by Predator Free 2050 Limited, to help achieve the goal of eliminating rats, stoats and possums from New Zealand.

  7. Backpacking kākā in the Waikato

    The kākā is a large, noisy, olive-brown parrot, endemic to New Zealand and usually found in native forest. Under threat particularly from predatory stoats and possums, and from habitat loss, kākā are classified nationally as “At Risk”.

  8. Outsmarting the smartest – progress in eradicating the last 5%

    New Zealand is a world leader in controlling and, in some areas, eradicating invasive mammalian predators. Much of that innovation has been in developing and deploying devices such as traps and bait delivery mechanisms, but those devices and methods can only achieve complete eradication if all indiv...

  9. DNA codes broken for stoats and ship rats

    The complete genome of the stoat (Mustela ermine) – one of New Zealand’s most destructive introduced predators – is now available to researchers, courtesy of the US-based National Center for Biotechnology Information genome database. This work comes hard on the heels of work to sequence the ship rat...

  10. Smarter trapping for better results

    Manaaki Whenua’s Dr Patrick Garvey and colleagues recently published new findings on the manipulation of stoat behaviour in work linked to the MBIE programme [Eradicating the Last 5%].