While spotting the oystercatchers and dotterels with their chicks was the most heart warming experience of our trip, the many, many bags of rubbish we picked up on our walk to, from and around the spit was the most heart breaking. When we first arrived in Port Waikato...
Shortly after accepting the Blake Ambassadorship, I started my new job doing GIS mapping and data analysis for Central Districts Pest Control in Napier. In university, we spent around a week learning about the predators of our native species and the forms of pest...
The second week we were back near Hamilton, setting up a stream sedimentation experiment on a farm in Whatawhata. This experiment is run by Brian Smith and Richard Storey, two NIWA freshwater biologists who focus on aquatic invertebrate research. Excess sedimentation...
Our journey here started off with two flights and a weekly grocery stop in Nelson before driving a little over an hour to Saint Arnaud. During this first week we have been based around the Saint Arnaud Ranges, Lake Rotoiti and the local DOC office, workshop and...
I spent most of the first week of my NIWA ambassadorship in the Coromandel, monitoring stream invertebrates in forestry catchments with Brian Smith, a freshwater biologist, and Kat Reeves, a freshwater ecology technician. We monitored 13 sites in total, which were...