Jobs for Nature | Mahi mō te Taiao
Strengthening our shared connections to land, water and ecology
WAI Wānaka currently employs 21 people to carry out environmental activities on farms. This is funded through the Ministry for Primary Industry’s Jobs for Nature / Mahi mō te Taiao fund. Our team work on-farm to assist landowners to accelerate their efforts towards achieving their biosecurity, biodiversity and freshwater goals – as laid out in their farm environment plans.
Working with catchment groups for enduring outcomes this project carries out a number of workstreams to improve ecosystem health across the Upper Clutha basin.
For each workstream, WAI develops a basin-wide strategy and works alongside community groups, councils, DOC and contractors.
WORKSTREAMS
Planting
The right tree in the right place
WAI Wānaka works with plant experts, community groups and local nurseries to assist landowners plant the right tree in the right place – whether planting for ecological restoration, riparian planting for water quality or planting for carbon sequestration.
Maintaining these plantings – adding protectors, clearing weeds and mulching – can be a big job but drastically improve the survival and growth rates. The WAI field crew spend a lot of time on post-planting care!
Weed control
Improving biosecurity
The team are trained up to help landowners control weeds that are classified as pest species.
Working across properties for increased effectiveness, the team take out broom, gorse, wilding conifers and other pest species. This helps minimise loss of native biodiversity through weeds outcompeting natives, and helps reduce the spread of emerging weed species including berberis, sycamore, nasella tussock and rowan.
Animal pest control
Protecting soil and vegetation
Assisting landowners with rabbit control by adding and maintaining rabbit proof fences and fumigating helps keep numbers down – reducing soil erosion, protecting native plantings and reducing food source for other pests such as cats, stoats and ferrets.
Possum control, using AT220 auto-resetting traps, is carried out to protect native vegetation. Possums are also vectors for diseases such as TB, so keeping numbers down is important to prevent the spread of these diseases to livestock.
Biodiversity & Freshwater Monitoring
Biodiversity and freshwater monitoring helps landowners track changes over time to make decisions based on data to protect and improve biodiversity within their farm systems. WAI Wānaka has developed a monitoring package to assist landowners to collect and collate this information.
This includes visual soil assessments, bird counts, stream health assessments (to complement regular nutrient testing) and vegetation photo points.
Carbon Planning
WAI Wānaka held a series of workshops with landowners to increase understanding the sources of emissions and sequestration of greenhouse gases (GHGs) on farms, and tools currently available to estimate property GHGs.
Landowners are now calculating their emissions and developing plans aligned with information from He Waka Eke Noa and industry bodies.
Jobs for Nature Links
For further details about WAI Wānaka’s Jobs for Nature programme, check out the below links.
VIDEOS
Environmental Monitoring:
Biodiversity and Freshwater Monitoring
Biodiversity refers to the variety of life (biological diversity) in a specified area. Aotearoa is internationally recognised as being a hotspot for biodiversity. Many of our native flora, fauna and fungi are found nowhere else in the world.
Sheep and beef farms make up 40% of land area in Aotearoa and contain nearly 25% of remaining native vegetation.
WAI Wānaka has developed a biodiversity and freshwater monitoring package to support landowners to understand the unique biodiversity on their farms. Monitoring soils, vegetation, birdlife and stream health allows informed decision making that will protect and improve biodiversity.
Watch the video to see how WAI Wānaka are supporting landowners to understand the unique diversity on their farms.
Pest Control:
Coordinated Rabbit Control
Rabbits are a serious threat to our bio-diversity and environment. They cause soil degradation and erosion, which affects water quality through increased sediment entering waterways.
Rabbits destroy native vegetation and habitat for our native fauna.
Ten rabbits can eat as much grass as one sheep, which affects pastoral production and they breed like, well, rabbits.
Watch the video to find out how WAI Wānaka are helping local landowners coordinate and carry out rabbit control to save native biodiversity and protect productive land.
Climate Change:
Carbon Planning
When we talk about carbon, we are talking about greenhouse gases or GHG (carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide) emitted into the atmosphere by the activities of an individual, company, country, etc.
According to the Ministry for the Environment, Agriculture contributes half of our total greenhouse gas emissions. While many farmers and growers are already reducing their emissions, much work is needed to help Aotearoa New Zealand become a low-emissions country.
Watch the video to find out how WAI Wānaka are working with landowners in the Upper Clutha basin to understand their GHG emissions number and help them with sequestration planting.
Weed control:
Wilding conifers
Wilding conifers (also known as wilding pines) are introduced conifer trees which have self-seeded and are growing where they are not wanted — they are the wrong tree in the wrong place.
The effects of wilding conifers are numerous and significant. They favour our unique climate, nearly doubling the growth rate of their natural homeland. Spreading at 5% or 90,000ha per year in Aotearoa – that’s an area larger than the Queenstown Lakes District! They outcompete native plants, and contribute to the reduction in surface water availability (particularly in areas with seasonal soil moisture deficits) resulting in habitat and biodiversity loss and significant landscape and soil quality changes.
Watch the video to find out how WAI Wānaka are working with landowners to help stop the spread of wilding conifer infestations.
ACHIEVEMENTS
Since the beginning of WAI Wānaka’s Jobs for Nature programme in November 2020:
16470
Native trees planted by Jobs for Nature field teams
84%
of primary income farms in the catchment are engaged
45
Properties assisted with rabbit control work
480
Possum monitoring chewcards distributed and checked in the Cardrona and Maungawera Valleys
10
Action groups formed:
6 catchment groups (farmers)
4 small landholder groups (20 ha+)
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