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2024 Newsletters

  1. Down to the ground

    Soil sampling is long hours of hot, dirty work – and the end result is information for 10 million hectares of farmable land across AoNZ being available via S-map.

  2. S-map expands further

    Manaaki Whenua has completed an extra 500,000 hectares of new soil mapping coverage across some of AoNZ’s best food-producing land.

  3. Filling in the blanks

    As part of ongoing efforts to extend the coverage of S-map, a team of pedologists from Manaaki Whenua recently targeted one of the very conspicuous blank spots – Banks Peninsula in Canterbury.

  4. Scouting out soil data

    Although the stony soils of the upper Wairau Valley, Marlborough, have underpinned the success of winemakers, they have made soil mapping there a slow and arduous task.

  5. Smarter research hits its target

    The Smarter Targeting of Erosion Control programme has wrapped up five years of research aimed at answering some of the key questions around where erosion occurs and how much and what type of sediment is produced by which processes.

  6. Fingerprints point to the sediment source

    Manaaki Whenua researchers are recognised internationally for their knowledge of sediment fingerprinting (also referred to as sediment tracing), an approach that directly connects the place where erosion happens in a catchment to the sediment that ends up in downstream rivers or lakes.

  7. Closing the ‘window of vulnerability’

    Most commercial forests in Aotearoa New Zealand are clear-fell harvested. Trees of harvest age are cut down in areas called coupes or compartments. In many forests, these compartments often include steep hillsides, which go from being forested for decades to being bare and visible almost overnight. ...

  8. Keeping urban soils spongy

    Manaaki Whenua researchers are assessing the impact of urban development on soils, quantifying if urbanisation is making soils less spongy. Urbanisation is associated with increased stormwater run-off, largely due to an increase in impervious surfaces. When coupled with less spongy greenspaces and e...

  9. Maximising use of ‘surplus’ soils and sediments

    Manaaki Whenua researchers have developed the first ever AoNZ guide to help improve the management of surplus soils. These are the soils left behind after excavations and widespread soil disturbance associated with building and infrastructure developments, or natural processes such as landslips. Typ...

  10. How farming and changing irrigation affect nitrogen and phosphorus runoff

    Irrigation to increase pasture and crop yields is often associated with an increase in nutrient inputs through fertiliser and changing management practices. Use of these practices has raised concerns about nutrient losses and their potential environmental impacts, especially for water quality.