agroecosystems

The incorporation of native, woody vegetation into New Zealand’s agricultural ecosystems offers a “nature-based solution” approach for mitigating poor environmental outcomes of land use practices, biodiversity loss, and the accelerating effects of climatic change. However, to achieve this at scale requires a systematic framework for scoping, assessing, and targeting native revegetation opportunities in a way that addresses national-scale priorities, supports landscape-scale ecological processes, and recognises that land use decisions are made at farm-scales by landowners.

Despite one-third of New Zealand’s landmass being protected as public conservation land, the country still faces significant conservation challenges. Nearly 50% of the country’s landmass has been converted to pastoral farming, and biological invasions pose a sustained and growing threat to remaining biodiversity across all land tenures. Managing and protecting biodiversity on-farm provides vast opportunities to create nature-rich pastoral landscapes.

Pastoral farming is the dominant land use in New Zealand today and is under considerable domestic social and political pressure to reduce its environmental footprint. In this article, we explore options to enhance native biodiversity conservation within New Zealand pastoral systems. We argue that there is strong synergistic interdependence between biodiversity conservation and pastoral farming and suggest that it is possible to have win-win outcomes for both.

Spider assemblages were sampled by quantitative sampling in pasture and arable habitats under different management regimes in the lower North Island of New Zealand. Density and species diversity increased with decreasing frequency and/or intensity of disturbance from two species and 1.8 individuals per m in wheat to 16 species and 130 indiv. per m in an abandoned, ungrazed pasture. The spider fauna was dominated by introduced species of money spiders (Linyphiidae). The most abundant species, Lepthyphantes tenuis, is also the most abundant one in British cultivated habitats.