dynamics

The National Vegetation Survey (NVS) databank is designed to safeguard the investment of millions of dollars spent over the last 50 years collecting, computerising and checking New Zealand vegetation data and to optimise the potential knowledge gains from these data. Data such as these can be synthesised across a range of spatial and temporal scales, allow novel ecological questions to be considered, and can underpin land management and legal reporting obligations.

Primary successions involving teatree (Kunzea ericoides var. ericoides with some Leptospermum scoparium) were studied on shallow landslide scars on soft sedimentary (mudstone) hill country under extensive pastoral use in the East Cape (Tairawhiti) region, using a 5-72 yr chronosequence established from sequential aerial photography and the age of the oldest teatrees on scars. Dynamics of primary even-aged teatree stands are similar to those in secondary successions on reverting pasture described previously from the region.

Over five years from November 1982 to November 1987, we examined 395 mice collected from unlogged and logged native forest and from exotic forest at Pureora Forest Park, in the central North Island of New Zealand. Sex ratio, litter size, and breeding effort (pregnancy rate in females, proportion of males with visible tubules) were similar in all samples.

A vegetation sampling technique is described where the prime measurement is only the listing of the relative order of abundance (rank) of species at a series of sample points and is estimated visually. Such data are appropriate for ordinal methods of statistical analysis. Repeated measurements show that the observer is only a small component of variation in rank values.