Research Article

Indigenous vegetation fragments in agricultural landscapes are vulnerable to creeping edge effects and stochastic extinctions on top of the effects of historic land use and disturbance which have already resulted in significant changes to baselines. Agricultural intensification can potentially increase these threats through spillover of nutrients, water, and weeds, especially in dryland ecosystems which are naturally low in nitrogen and soil moisture.

Floristic boundaries, where the range limits of multiple species coincide, are frequently recognised ecological phenomena for which underlying mechanisms are often unclear. Plant species range limits are often determined by their tolerance to climatic conditions. Therefore, the positions of floristic boundaries are also likely related to climatic conditions. Seedlings are a vulnerable life stage and are often highly susceptible to adverse climatic events such as frosts, and frost susceptibility varies among plant species.

Human impacts in Aotearoa New Zealand have considerably damaged native ecosystems, and conservation efforts must therefore preserve remaining ecosystems and restore degraded areas. However, restoration efforts must address several challenges including species authenticity, plant survival and seedling regeneration in the presence of exotic competition, browsing mammals, and vagaries of climate. Styx Mill Conservation Reserve (SMCR), Christchurch, contains a remnant freshwater wetland in a floodplain complex where restoration activities were initiated in 2000 under a 40-year plan.

Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) is a critical tool in the monitoring and conservation of native species but until now its use in the detection of invasive species has been under-utilised. We present the first publicly available dataset of invasive common brushtail possum (Trichosurus vulpecula) vocalisations including 3500 annotated field recording segments. This study presents an automatic classification model designed and fine-tuned to detect the presence/absence of possums, achieving 98.4% test set accuracy and F1 score of 0.983.

Drought-resistant woody communities were once widespread in the intermontane basins and slopes of Molesworth Recreation Reserve, northeastern South Island. These forests, woodlands, and shrublands had established by 6000 years BP, and were largely converted to tussock grassland by fire before 1800 AD. Sheep and rabbit herbivory, and regular burning had altered the vegetation by 1940. From the 1940s, beef cattle grazing was adopted on Molesworth along with repeated aerial over-sowing of exotic pasture grasses and suppression of fires.

Understanding the key pollinators of rare plants is important for a holistic assessment of ecosystem health, as the impact on a given species can travel through the network, affecting other species. Many specialist calcicolous (limestone-specific) plants are rare. Conservation management plans have been developed to assist in the survival of these rare plant species, but these rarely include information on pollinators.

The role of vegetation in the relationship between microhabitat and ship rat (Rattus rattus) distribution remains poorly understood. We used three years of trapping data (2017–2020) to calculate capture rates for 97 traps in the Makarora Valley and Haast Pass areas of Mt Aspiring National Park and determined aspects of the vegetation surrounding traps that influenced capture rates.

Artificial light at night (ALAN) exposes many organisms to increased night-time radiance and disrupts natural cycles that have cued the physiology and ecology of plants and animals throughout their evolutionary history. Here, we use satellite data to quantify spatiotemporal trends of ALAN in Aotearoa New Zealand between 2012–2021 and review the literature of the ecological impacts of ALAN.

Although New Zealand’s 2020 biodiversity strategy, Te Mana o Te Taiao, places a high priority on protecting indigenous ecosystems, it provides minimal detail on how this will be accomplished. Using spatial data and a conservation prioritisation tool we demonstrate the implementation of a comprehensive framework for the systematic conservation of New Zealand’s terrestrial ecosystems, as proposed in a pioneering paper by Kelly (1980).

Accurate determination of animal diets is difficult. Methods such as molecular barcoding or metagenomics offer a promising approach allowing quantitative and sensitive detection of different taxa. Here we show that rapid and inexpensive quantification of animal, plant, and fungal content from stomach contents is possible through metagenomic sequencing with the portable Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT) MinION. Using an amplification-free approach, we profile the stomach contents from 24 wild-caught rats.