Department of Conservation

Introduced ungulates are an important management issue on New Zealand’s public conservation land (PCL). Ungulates are harvested by recreational and commercial hunters, with some government-funded culling. A robust monitoring system is needed to reliably report trends in occupancy and abundance, and to evaluate management effectiveness. We first describe the design and implementation of a monitoring programme enabling ungulate occupancy and relative abundances to be estimated on New Zealand’s PCL.

This article assesses compliance with biodiversity compensation on New Zealand’s conservation land. Of the 261 Department of Conservation (DOC) concessions for commercial activity searched, only about 15% included compensation provisions. A sample of 20 concessions of that 15% suggests 68% achieve full compliance. Our results suggest compliance is influenced by factors such as habitat and activity type, protected area category, and whether a concession holder has pending concessions and/or renewals. Inconsistencies in compliance monitoring, enforcement, and reporting merit attention.