Aotearoa New Zealand is an unusual place. Its millions of years of isolation allowed life to evolve in a unique environment. As a result, significant numbers of our fungi, plant and animal ...
Ranking species according to their risk of extinction is an important tool in conservation management. The Department of Conservation (DOC) spends almost 15% of its total budget on species ...
Human beings have an impact on river ecosystems. The relationship living organisms have with each other and with their environment is extremely complex. Impacts on a species or a non-living ...
Throughout human existence we have relied on the oceans – for food, as a waste dump, for recreation, for economic opportunities and so on. However, it’s not only our activities in the marine ...
The traditional concept of kaitiakitanga is part of a complex, social, cultural, economic and spiritual system that has been established through long association of iwi and hapū with land and ...
New Zealand is home to a wide variety of water fowl. Water fowl is the common name for the Anatidae, the family of birds that includes ducks, geese and swans. Most of the Anatidae in New Zealand ...
An ecosystem consists of all of the organisms living within an area and the interactions between them and the physical environment. All ecosystems, whether they are marine, freshwater or located ...
Estuaries are extremely valuable. They: are nurseries – breeding grounds for fish and birds maintain the health of coastal fisheries and waters are a buffer between land and sea – protecting the ...
Historical artefacts like moa bones can be dated using a technique that measures the activity of the radioisotope carbon-14 still present in the sample. By comparing this with a modern standard ...
1080 is the brand name for sodium fluoroacetate – a manufactured poison. It is the sodium salt of a naturally occurring plant toxin called fluoroacetate. Plants use this toxin to defend ...
People like to live near estuaries. In pre-European times, estuaries were favourite places for Māori to gather – particularly to harvest and enjoy kaimoana. Today, there are major settlements ...
Takahē (Porphyrio hochstetteri) once lived throughout the South Island. Their original habitats were the bushy edges of lowland swamps and rivers. Today’s remnant takahē population lives in the ...
The takahē (Porphyrio hochstetteri) is an endangered species and classed as nationally vulnerable under the New Zealand Threat Classification System. The takahē is a flightless bird found only in ...
The takahē is a large, flightless bird – the largest living rail bird in the world. Rails are a family of ground-living birds and live on every continent except Antarctica. Takahē are endemic to ...
An inquiry approach is a method often used in science education. The question bank provides an initial list of questions about pollination and places where their answers can be found. The article ...
In 2017, New Zealand’s Biological Heritage National Science Challenge surveyed 8,000 people about pest control, and 84% agreed that pests are a significant conservation problem. However, there is ...
In pre-human times, almost all of New Zealand was covered in forest, with the exception of high mountain areas. Māori settlers began to clear forest, and by the time the first Europeans arrived ...
Takahē are one of New Zealand’s conservation success stories. Their conservation status has moved from extinct to nationally vulnerable in the 70 years since they were rediscovered in the ...
This animated video shows the movement of the tectonic plates that make up the Earth’s crust. Starting 600 million years ago, watch continents form and break apart as the plates move. Pangaea the ...
Skinks and geckos are the only 2 native families of lizard found in Aotearoa New Zealand (note that tuatara are not lizards). They are vertebrates and belong to the class Reptilia. All our native ...
Bats are found throughout the world, except in areas of extreme cold. New Zealand has three species of endemic bats – the long-tailed bat, the lesser short-tailed bat and the greater short-tailed ...
The Aotearoa New Zealand longfin eel tuna (Anguilla dieffenbachii) is New Zealand’s only endemic freshwater eel. Our shortfin eel (Anguilla australis) is also found in Australia and some Pacific ...
A habitat is the area where an organism or group of organisms live and breed. One habitat will be distinct from another due to its particular environmental conditions. However, habitats are not ...
New Zealand’s streams, lakes, rivers and wetlands support around 54 species of native fish including galaxiids, bullies, eels, lamprey, black flounder, torrentfish, smelt and mullet – and these ...
