At Waikereru, many rare Tairāwhiti plants are being looked after for future generations.
At Waikereru, many rare Tairāwhiti plants are being looked after for future generations.
The 1769 Seed Archive, and our collaboration with Dr Edwin Rose from the History and Philosophy of Science department at the University of Cambridge, also featured in a post from the Natural History Museum in London
That collaboration has been exciting, and rewarding. With our support, Dr. Rose has been transcribing and translating Dr. Daniel Solander’s field notebooks, written in Latin, from the Endeavour voyage in 1769. These reveal that during the Endeavour’s visit to Tairāwhiti in 1769, the naturalists Joseph Banks and Dr. Daniel Solander with the Ra’iatean high priest navigator Tupaia as their interpreter recorded many Māori names for the plants they collected, and information about their uses by local people. That includes the term ‘manuca’ [mānuka], recorded in their field notebooks and manuscripts as the name for this species in Tairāwhiti. This is invaluable for local hapū, who are trying to stop Australian honey producers from pinching the name ‘mānuka’ for their products, derived from a different species of plant in Australia.
Edwin was thrilled to see many of the plants he knew only from pressed specimens in herbaria thriving in the 1769 Seed Archive - including mānuka.
The parking area is a godsend, with all the buses (and cars) that now regularly visit Waikereru - even if they don’t always quite make it through the gate!
It looks as though puriri trees at Waikereru grow at rates competitive with pine, while the growth rates for most other indigenous trees are about twice those for native forests in the Emissions Trading Scheme look-up tables.
This has a major economic impact.
If this is true across Tairāwhiti, those who regenerate and restore native forests should be getting at least twice what they are currently receiving from the ETS.
Sadly, though, those rates have just plummeted as a result of government policies that deny the devastating impacts of climate change.
Given billions of dollars of damage and the huge harm caused to lives, livelihoods and landscapes in regions like Tairāwhiti, Hawkes Bay and Nelson, this is difficult to understand.
]]>He’s putting us in touch with a PhD student from Kew who’s studying the underground life of these forests. Fascinating, and promising.
Sarosh and his partners have teamed up with CarbonTrail to track the emissions from their office work and projects, and to offset them in a way that helps to support our restoration and research programmes at Waikereru. A classic win-win, with their University of Auckland research into minimising emissions in architectural practice with our research-based programme of ecological restoration.
