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2021 News

  1. Exploring the impact of climate change on Māori

    Māori governance institutions are increasingly asserting their rangatiratanga (autonomy) to manage climate change risks and meet the well-being of whānau, hapū, and iwi. However, there is a shortage of guidance and understanding on how to prepare for and respond to this changing environment, and how...

  2. An update on our Better Border Biosecurity work

    Darren Ward and Quentin Paynter have been funded through Better Border Biosecurity (B3) to assess the non-target impact of biocontrol agents used in New Zealand over the past 100 years to control insect pests. The work will provide the EPA with information when assessing future applications for the ...

  3. Celebrating our achievements

    Jo Carpenter was awarded the 2020 New Zealand Ecological Society award for Outstanding Publication on New Zealand Ecology. Her paper, ‘An avian seed dispersal paradox: New Zealand’s extinct megafaunal birds did not disperse large seeds’, was published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

  4. Space invaders – revising the management of weeds

    Weed management efforts often focus on single, ‘priority’ plant species because they have known, substantial and detrimental ecosystem impacts. However, globally, most ecosystems have been invaded by multiple non-native plant species.

  5. Release of Te Ao Māori climate change report

    A new report provides guidance for te ao Māori on climate change adaptation and mitigation. The report was produced by a multidisciplinary Māori research team working across many research institutions.

  6. 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 breakthrough research, Manaaki Whenua – Landcare researchers Manpreet Dhami and Gabriel Moinet have made an important finding about the response of microbes to increasin...

  7. 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 ICMP (International Collection of Microorganisms from Plants) to investigate whether any of the 10,000+ fungi contained within have potential as new antibiotics.

  8. 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, 81% of arthropods, 60% of vertebrates, 36% of mosses and liverworts, and 30% of lichens are endemic, and these are particularly vulnerable to extinction. Competitio...

  9. 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 ...

  10. 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...