Source: Northland Regional Council
The ‘Conservation Status of Indigenous Vascular Plants in Northland’ provides the first comprehensive regional plant threat listing, giving landowners, hapū, iwi and resource managers a powerful tool to better protect 878 plants including rare and declining plant taxa.
The Northland Regional Council and a panel of botanist experts under the lead of senior author Marley Ford were tasked with undertaking a new regional threat listing, which will inform a national threat listing that will be updated every five years in future.
Council Biodiversity Manager, co-author and project coordinator, Lisa Forester says the report identifies plants that are rare in Taitokerau and allows for ongoing monitoring in a move to help prevent plants reaching regional extinction (or ‘extirpation’).
“Of the 878 plants we assessed, 34 plants are in the ‘extirpated’ category, with one (Adam’s mistletoe) being ‘nationally extinct’.” “A further 128 plants are in high threat categories and another 83 are likely to be threatened, but we didn’t have enough information to rank them.”
“Another 283 plants were labelled ‘at risk’ and likely to move into threat categories if they weren’t looked after.” “In total, less than 40% of Taitokerau plant taxa were ranked as not threatened,” she says.
Northland Regional Councillor and Chair of the Biodiversity and Biosecurity Working Party, Jack Craw, says while the results of the report are confronting, council remains hopeful that the next assessment will show an improvement.
“It’s a good way for people to get better with their plant knowledge, being able to identify them and learn.” “Because resources to undertake field monitoring are limited, community support is important to help monitor and care for the plants – everyone can play a part in protecting and monitoring our precious biodiversity.”
Northland’s ‘everyday botanists’ are encouraged to record plant sightings by photographing them and uploading to the iNaturalist website where anyone can get involved as removing these plants from the wild is discouraged.
Gathering data for conservation status rankings relies heavily on plant records and herbarium collections from professional and amateur botanists, past and present, who have spent countless hours in the field collecting the records that make these threat status assessments possible.
Ms Forester would like to thank the whole team of botanists and experts that sat on the panel and undertook the ranking, mostly voluntarily.
“For some of us it feels like a culmination of a life’s work and a great investment for the future, so we are very pleased and proud to finally have it finished.” “We know that it will be a useful document for to help prioritise conservation efforts going forward.”
This is the fourth regional plant threat assessment completed in Aotearoa, following assessments undertaken in Wellington, Auckland and Otago, and is intended to strengthen both local RMA decision-making and future national New Zealand Threat Classification System reassessments.
The full report can be found on the NRC website: www.nrc.govt.nz/vascularplants