Zealand Landscape Research Articles

Assessment of spatial variability and temporal stability of groundwater redox conditions in New Zealand.

Mitigating the impacts of agricultural nutrients (nitrogen and phosphorus) on water quality requires a clear understanding of their transport pathways and transformation processes from land to receiving waters. For nitrate, which is subject to subsurface denitrification, it is therefore important to assess the spatial variability and temporal stability of groundwater redox conditions, as nitrate reduction typically occurs in reducing conditions. This paper presents a robust assessment of a large groundwater quality data set collected across New Zealand landscapes, develops methods to impute missing groundwater redox-sensitive variables and characterises the spatial variability and temporal stability of groundwater redox conditions against relevant landscape hydrogeochemical characteristics. Random forest and extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) outperformed linear regression in predicting missing Mn2+ values, achieving higher accuracy (R2 > 0.8) and lower error (RMSE < 0.2mg/L). Analysis of groundwater redox conditions highlights considerable spatial variability, particularly influenced by subsurface geology (rock types) and soil characteristics such as soil carbon and drainage across various hydrogeological settings. Our findings also reveal a higher prevalence of oxidised redox status in shallower groundwater and greater temporal stability in oxidised conditions across New Zealand landscapes. These insights have significant implications for targeted management strategies to reduce nitrate losses from farming activities, particularly in oxidised, shallow groundwater across different hydrogeological land units.

Not seeing the wood for the (invasive) trees: Visitors’ perceptions of invasive wilding conifers in the New Zealand landscape

Currently we know little about how visitors perceive invasive species, nor how this may vary across visitor cohorts. Previous research suggests that visitors to natural areas have a low awareness of the impact of invasive species. This note reports on a survey of domestic and international visitors (n = 231) in New Zealand, investigating their awareness of invasive wild conifers and attitudes toward their control. Awareness of the wild conifer problem was generally low, especially among international visitors. There were significant differences between domestic and international visitors, and among visitors of different nationalities for how wild conifers were perceived. International visitors, and particularly those from China or other Asian countries were more accepting of wild conifers in the landscape and less supportive of eradication. The findings have implications for management of invasive species, which requires the support of all stakeholders, including tourists, recreationists and their associated sectors.

Cultural variation in New Zealand English stories about place

AbstractThis study is set in the context of Aotearoa New Zealand and investigates the influence of cultural knowledge on the type of topics that speakers of New Zealand Englishes (NZEs) associate to in their narrations. A storytelling task based on picture prompts of New Zealand landscapes shows a major difference between the cultural associations of Māori and Pākehā (New Zealand European) participants. The difference can be captured in two cultural frames that underlie the preferred topics chosen by the two groups. The findings are discussed in terms of their implications for defining NZEs, and they also bear ramifications for theory development in Cultural Linguistics, highlighting the nested and flexibly construable nature of cultural conceptualisations. For research on world Englishes, the study is an example of how cultural‐linguistic analyses can be extended towards larger cultural framings to explain cultural variation among speakers of Englishes.

Landscape through creative eyes: Strands spun by Doris Lusk, Charles Brasch, Bill Sutton, Lyell Cresswell and David Griffiths

This article explores previously undocumented connections between a group of New Zealand landscape paintings and the resulting poems, music and performance. This unplanned creative sequence, spanning 1964-2008, is the work of significant national cultural figures: Doris Lusk, Charles Brasch, W.A. Sutton, David Griffiths with The Ogen Trio, and Lyell Cresswell with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. Questions arise around the meaning of creative interpretations of nature and landscape, the interface between different formats, and challenges in confirming the identity of artworks. The watercolours (several held in major institutions) and poems are reproduced, together with other supporting images and documentation.

Whole-Genome Sequencing and Virulome Analysis of Escherichia coli Isolated from New Zealand Environments of Contrasting Observed Land Use.

ABSTRACTGeneric Escherichia coli is commonly used as an indicator of fecal contamination to assess water quality and human health risk. Where measured E. coli exceedances occur, the presence of other pathogenic microorganisms, such as Shiga toxin-producing E. coli (STEC), is assumed, but confirmatory data are lacking. Putative E. coli isolates (n = 709) were isolated from water, sediment, soil, periphyton, and feces samples (n = 189) from five sites representing native forest and agricultural environments. Ten E. coli isolates (1.41%) were stx2 positive, 19 (2.7%) were eae positive, and stx1-positive isolates were absent. At the sample level, stx2-positive E. coli (5 of 189, 2.6%) and eae-positive isolates (16 of 189, 8.5%) were rare. Using real-time PCR, these STEC-associated virulence factors were determined to be more prevalent in sample enrichments (stx1, 23.9%; stx2, 31.4%; eae, 53.7%) and positively correlated with generic E. coli isolate numbers (P < 0.05) determined using culture-based methods. Whole-genome sequencing (WGS) was undertaken on a subset of 238 isolates with assemblies representing seven E. coli phylogroups (A, B1, B2, C, D, E, and F), 22 Escherichia marmotae isolates, and 1 Escherichia ruysiae isolate. Virulence factors, including those from extraintestinal pathogenic E. coli, were extremely diverse in isolates from the different locations and were more common in phylogroup B2. Analysis of the virulome from WGS data permitted the identification of gene repertoires that may be involved in environmental fitness and broadly align with phylogroup. Although recovery of STEC isolates was low, our molecular data indicate that they are likely to be widely present in environmental samples containing diverse E. coli phylogroups.IMPORTANCE This study takes a systematic sampling approach to assess the public health risk of Escherichia coli recovered from freshwater sites within forest and farmland. The New Zealand landscape is dominated by livestock farming, and previous work has demonstrated that “recreational exposure to water” is a risk factor for human infection by Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli (STEC). Though STEC isolates were rarely isolated from water samples, STEC-associated virulence factors were identified more commonly from water sample culture enrichments and were associated with increased generic E. coli concentrations. Whole-genome sequencing data from both E. coli and newly described Escherichia spp. demonstrated the presence of virulence factors from E. coli pathotypes, including extraintestinal pathogenic E. coli. This has significance for understanding and interpreting the potential health risk from E. coli where water quality is poor and suggests a role of virulence factors in survival and persistence of E. coli and Escherichia spp.

Performance Evaluation: Identifying Barriers and Enablers for Landscape Architecture Practice

Performance evaluation is crucial for environmental design and sustainable development, especially so for architecture and landscape architecture. However, such performance evaluations remain rare in practice. It is argued that the concerns over potential negative evaluations and a lack of funding are the two main barriers preventing the undertaking of performance evaluations. This research investigated how these two barriers were overcome in practice by studying 41 evaluation cases in the New Zealand landscape architecture field, as well as several international and architectural case studies for comparison. A range of enablers for performance evaluation practices were identified by this research, including funding sources and models that were not documented by existing literature, as well as two strategies for handling the risks of negative evaluation. All of the identified enablers share the same underlying logic—the benefits and costs of an evaluation should be well-regulated by certain mechanisms to keep the benefits of an evaluation greater than, or at least balanced with, the costs, for all the parties involved in the evaluation.

Trait‐habitat associations explain novel bird assemblages mixing native and alien species across New Zealand landscapes

AbstractAimSpecies introductions have reshaped island faunas for the last 200 years, often threatening native biodiversity. Approximately equal numbers of native and alien species currently co‐occur in the New Zealand avifauna, but they show distinct habitat use. Antagonistic interactions, habitat affinities and legacies of introduction history may concur to explain their segregation along habitat gradients. To investigate these processes, we explored how habitat, ecological traits and introduction history relate with the current composition of bird assemblages.LocationNew ZealandTaxonBirdsMethodsWe analysed 917 bird point counts spread along habitat and elevation gradients in the Canterbury region, South Island and related 10 ecological traits to landscape composition using a three‐table ordination method known as “RLQ analysis”, accounting for spatial autocorrelation and phylogeny. We tested whether alien species’ positions in the RLQ were related to proxies of introduction history.ResultsEighteen endemic, 11 native and 19 alien species were distributed along a gradient from forest to open‐habitat assemblages, in relation to foraging mode, nesting site and body size. A second gradient segregated species between native and exotic forests according to territoriality, sedentarity and diet. Traits accounted for the separation of native and alien bird species in forests, but not in open habitats. Phylogenetic signals emerged from the separation of native and alien species by forest type, and spatial structures suggested a landscape‐level, rather than regional or local determinism. These correlations were independent of introduction history, although open‐habitat assemblages tended to host alien species introduced later in time.Main conclusionsHabitat type and resource availability explain the spatial partitioning of New Zealand bird assemblages between native and alien species more consistently than competitive exclusion. We conclude that trait‐mediated ecological differences among species have likely played a predominant role in species’ segregation among landscapes, while maintaining endemic bird assemblages in native forests.

Habitat-specific densities of urban brushtail possums

Invasive mammalian pests threaten biodiversity globally across a diverse range of habitats. The unique combination of resource subsidies and disturbance in cities can provide favourable conditions for invasion. Recent interest in urban biodiversity enhancement has increased the demand for effective urban pest control, but efforts are often hampered by a lack of understanding of the ecology of urban invasive mammals. The Australian common brushtail possum (Trichosurus vulpecula) has invaded most New Zealand landscapes, including urban areas, and is a nationally significant pest species. Recent shifts in national pest control and conservation priorities demand an assessment of the capacity for urban areas to harbour possum populations. We estimated the density of possums across three representative habitat types within the city of Dunedin, New Zealand: an urban forest fragment and two residential areas of varying vegetation quality. Possums were live-trapped and camera-trapped over eight days at each site in late summer to early autumn. Spatially explicit capture-recapture methods were used to estimate density at each site, and “minimum number alive” estimates were also calculated. Our estimate suggests that the forest fragment supported possums at a density (3.1 ha−1) capable of inflicting harm on resident native wildlife, but this density was low compared with non-urban estimates in the same forest type, suggesting a possible influence of disturbance from human activity in and around the fragment. Few possums were caught at the two residential sites (0.1 ha−1 at each), and behavioural avoidance may have reduced capture success there. Our estimates confirm that urban areas are an important habitat for possums, and our study provides the first rigorous estimates of urban possum density, which can be incorporated into predictive modelling and other methods of control planning.

Macroclimate and Topography Interact to Influence the Abundance of Divaricate Plants in New Zealand.

The abundance of the divaricate growth form in New Zealand has been interpreted as either (a) the response of an isolated flora to cool, dry, Plio-Pleistocene climates; or (b) a defense against large browsing birds (moa) that were hunted to extinction shortly after human arrival during the last millennium. We used patterns of divaricate plant abundance across present-day landscapes to test a novel synthetic hypothesis: that the divaricate form is of most value to plants on fertile soils that attract herbivores, on sites where climatic constraints prevent plants from quickly growing out of the browse zone. This hypothesis predicts that divaricate species should be most abundant on terraces (landforms that are both fertile and frost-prone) in regions that are cold and dry, and should be scarce across all topographic positions in the warmest (largely frost-free) regions. To address our hypothesis, we first tested the influence of topography on frost regimes and nutrient levels by measuring temperatures and soil total C, N, and P at four standard topographic positions at five localities differing widely in macroclimate. We then extracted a dataset of 236 surveys comprising 9,877 relevé plots from the New Zealand National Vegetation Survey databank. We calculated the proportion of arborescent species with a divaricate growth form and the proportion of total arborescentcover contributed by divaricates on each plot; we then fitted linear mixed-effect models predicting these response variables as functions of topographic position and climate. The number of frosts recorded averaged <1 yr–1 at the warmest of the five sites studied, to >60 yr–1 on all topographic positions at the coldest site. Terraces were subject to more frequent and harder frosts than any other topographic position. Topography had no significant influence on total N or C:N, but total P was higher on terraces and in gullies than on faces or ridges. Frost-free period was the dominant influence on both species representation and cover of divaricate plants throughout the country. The effect of topography was also significant, but weaker. The effect of frost-free period was stronger on sites with water deficits than on sites where precipitation exceeded evapotranspiration. Divaricates made their largest contributions on terraces in cold, dry regions; as predicted, they were scarce on all topographic positions on sites with frost-free periods >300 days. Our hypothesis was generally supported, although the effect of topography on divaricate abundance was not as strong as some previous studies led us to expect. Divaricates made their largest contributions to arborescent species richness and cover on sites where climatic restrictions on growth coincide with relatively high nutrient availability. The contemporary distribution of the divaricate form across New Zealand landscapes thus appears to be reasonably well explained by the hypothesized interaction of climate and fertility-mediated browsing, although experiments may provide more conclusive tests of this hypothesis.

Designing Aotearoa New Zealand with nature: landscape regeneration of Western Waiheke Island

Design with Nature had a global impact on late twentieth-century landscape architectural practice. This paper looks at both the direct influence of the text and how McHarg’s ideas were developed on Waiheke Island New Zealand. The project that we will examine is the Western Waiheke Entrance Landscape (Western Landscape), a 430-ha (1065 ac.) landscape project that is now 30 years old. The project was designed by a New Zealand landscape architect/planner, Dennis Scott [DJScott Associates Ltd (DJSA)] and has been widely deemed as a well-rounded ecological, social and economic success winning the NZILA enduring landscape award in 2017 (NZILA in Showcase: enduring category winner: Waiheke Western Entrance Headland Landscape, D J Scott Associates. https://nzila.co.nz/showcase/waiheke-island-western-entrance-headland-landscape , 2017). The DJSA design methodology combines integrated catchment management and a wide range of human activity into an ecologically regenerated landscape. We argue that this approach is a conscious, yet indigenous, development of Ian McHarg’s theory and methodology as expounded in the seminal book Design with Nature. These ideas and the consequences for the transformation of an important landscape point to new directions for socio-ecological practice.

New Zealand landscape. Behind the scene

New Zealand landscape. Behind the scene

The ecologist and the journalist: Imaginings of place in the New Zealand nonfiction of Geoff Park and Steve Braunias

Using an Aotearoa New Zealand case study and a contemporary settler-colonial context, this article brings together two traditions of writing about place: that associated with the “New Nature Writing” and that stemming from a sociological or journalistic approach. Place writing shifts location from the background or setting, to being an explicit topic of investigation, and as such bears a relationship to a long history of nature writing and environmental thought. However, it is not given that when we think about “place” we turn to ecology and history. This article activates the potential openness of the idea of “place writing” to develop a model for considerations of different kinds of engagements with place alongside one another. It compares the textual literary geographies created by ecologist Geoff Park in Ngā Uruora /The Groves of Life: Ecology and History in a New Zealand Landscape (1995) and journalist Steve Braunias in Civilisation: Twenty Places on the Edge of the World (2012), paying attention to the role played in these imaginaries by the form of the nonfiction first-person essay. While Park’s book is representative of a path of settler-colonial writing that evokes place through an engagement with Nature, history and Indigenous experience, Braunias’s is representative of a quite different path, one predominantly focused on the various people who live in a place now. In both cases, the writers’ settler-colonial situation complicates the claims they make, while their Pākehā identities unsettle identification of what or who is “native” to either land or society in any location. This article argues that each path provides a potential corrective to the oversights and sentimentality of the other. Treating them together reveals much about Pākehā stories of place and the questions that arise from them, and adds new complexity and nuance to our understandings of place and environmental writing generally.

Haumanu ipukarea, ki uta ki tai: (re)connecting to landscape and reviving the sense of belonging for health and wellbeing

ABSTRACTIn Aotearoa/New Zealand landscapes were personified by the Indigenous Māori through the contention that the relationship with the land forms the basis of their existence, where everything visible and invisible, tangible and intangible is inseparable. However, in the current context, cultural and ancestral landscapes have been desecrated by growing demands from colonization, capitalism, urbanization, and globalization. This article explores the potential for reinstating the ideologies associated with traditional Indigenous knowledge and the intricacies of interconnectedness between environments and people for improved health and wellbeing. It examines new ways of integrating Māori knowledge in design to expand the concepts of belonging, identity, quality of life and place. Taking a case study approach, it focuses on an infested waterway that meanders through a regenerating valley system at the heart of Wellington, the capital of Aotearoa/New Zealand. The study encapsulates the notions of ki uta ki tai (to the mountains to the sea) and hīkoi (traditional form of walking and talking with the land and exhuming meaning) and looks at healing remaining endemic ecologies in an attempt to recreate identity and sense of belonging. It hereby assists in reconnecting Māori and connecting non-Māori to their natural surroundings, following bicultural and Indigenous constructs.

Top of the Lake’s Emotional Landscape: Reparation at the Edge of the World

This essay discusses the TV series Top of the Lake (Campion 2013) within the frameworks of theories of trauma and psychoanalytic object relations. The essay’s focus falls on the prominence given to the New Zealand landscape in the series and in reviews, and on Top of the Lake’s apparently paradoxical combining of a narrative concern with extreme violence and performances that evoke childlike playfulness. Having examined the possibility of categorising the series as a trauma text, the essay concludes by proposing that its formal and narrative elements combine to produce a spectatorial experience that evokes potential space while triggering reparative impulses.

Stable isotopes reveal human influences on southern New Zealand soils

A multi-isotopic soil study across a southern New Zealand transect has been undertaken as part of a geochemical baseline survey to identify human impacts on New Zealand's landscape and characterise different land uses and anthropogenic effects. Carbon, nitrogen and sulphur isotopes from two soil depths (0–30 and 50–70 cm) were acquired across a variety of land uses (including pristine national parks, urban centres, intensively farmed pastoral land), climates (dry <500 mm annual rainfall to wet >6000 mm annual rainfall), altitude (sea level to >2300 m above sea level) and soil parent material lithology (sandstone, schist, basalt). Detrital organic matter accumulated more in lowlands than at higher altitudes with higher carbon and nitrogen contents found in river valleys. Carbon isotopes clearly differentiated between drier higher altitude or open pastoral sites (more positive values) and wetter forested sites (more negative values). Nitrogen isotopes reflect anthropogenic human influence with elevated values around urban and intensively farmed sites, and lower values characterising indigenous forests and pristine sites. Sulphur isotopes either show more positive values, typical of fertilisers, rain or sea spray in open pastoral sites, or more negative values consistent with weathered geological sources such as metamorphic sulphides found in schist in some river valley sites. The study demonstrates that regional isotope studies are a potential tool to understand the long and short term impacts on landscapes, and may be useful for future mineral exploration, urban health studies, agricultural site remediation, and land use control and regulation.

The Protagonist as a Learner, and the Author as a Teacher in Jack Lasenby’s Novel, The Lake

The young adult novels of multi award-winning New Zealand writer, Jack Lasenby, are strongly influenced by his careers as a primary school teacher and deer-culler, and love of story. In his first novel, The Lake, Lasenby depicts Ruth, the protagonist, as a learner who seeks knowledge in much the same way that he, the author-teacher, crafts his work. Incorporating features of John Dewey’s Progressive Education system into the novel, Lasenby emphasises the interrelatedness of diverse characters, and of society, nature, and myth, the notion of a wholeness comprising integrated parts, and the possibility of a truth gained through experiential learning and the imagination. Alienated, oppressed, and lonely, Ruth has experienced parental neglect and abuse, and escapes from the social world to a recognisable fictional wilderness based on the New Zealand landscape of Lasenby’s deer-culling days. At the same time she sees in society and the landscape images that represent herself and her dysfunctional family, and comes painfully to terms with these. Lasenby’s allusions to Maori and Biblical myth add to the multiple perspectives that Ruth (and the implied reader) must resolve in order to arrive at some truth.

Black rainbow, blood-earth: Speaking the nuclearized Pacific in Albert Wendt’s Black Rainbow

Nuclear testing on the Pacific Islands in the 20th century cemented nuclear colonialism as a defining feature of transnational neocolonialism, its ongoing consequences and justificatory fictions iterating across both the rapidly expanding nuclear and toxic waste disposal industries and headline-making transnational negotiations such as the 2015 US–India and Canada–India nuclear trade deals. This article probes nuclearism’s critical implications for postcolonial literary scholarship by investigating the nuclear thematics structuring leading West Samoan novelist Albert Wendt’s dystopian allegory of corporate totalitarianism, Black Rainbow. It explores how the novel characterizes nuclear toxicity as the intersection between material and spiritual colonialisms, from Aotearoa/New Zealand landscapes toxified by nuclear violence and colonial erasure to human bodies dis-eased when radiogenic illness entangles with the products of neo-liberal economics. Given Oceania’s centrality at the convergence of nuclear industries with the ongoing human and environmental costs of neocolonial violence, Wendt’s 1992 restorying of Oceanic resistance has never been more relevant.

Unpacking the Kists: The Scots in New Zealandby Brad Patterson, Tom Brooking, and Jim McAloon

Unpacking the Kists: The Scots in New Zealand, by Brad Patterson, Tom Brooking, and Jim McAloon. Montreal & Kingston, London, Ithaca, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2013. xx, 412 pp. $100 Cdn (cloth). Unpacking the Kists: The Scots in New Zealand is an inter-disciplinary exploration of the Scottish emigrant experience in New Zealand. While historians have long claimed that New Zealand was more influenced by Scottish culture than anywhere else outside of Scotland, this is the first work to examine these claims in-depth and analyze the ways in which Scots negotiated with and affected their new environment. With the recent increase in ethnic and migration history, principally with regards to the Scottish diaspora, this book provides a particularly welcome, indeed needed, addition to present scholarship. The book is roughly organized into four parts. Following the first chapter, which explains the work's rationale and methodology, chapters two and three examine the statistical research used for the project. They provide a rigorous analysis of the movements, demographics and communities of Scots in New Zealand over different phases of settlement. Through a series of comparative studies of Scottish communities in New Zealand and Scotland, these chapters provide the quantitative groundwork for the more focused case studies that follow. The following section, encompassing chapters four through seven, looks at the impact that Scots had on New Zealand society, through examinations of their economic successes in relation to other British emigrants (particularly the English), their participation in civil society, their impact on the New Zealand environment, and their participation in Scottish ethnic associational culture. Chapters eight and nine examine the ways in which Scots maintained (or relinquished) their Scottishness within the private sphere; exploring the ways that the Scottish emigrants engaged with Scottish and colonial literature, religion, leisure activities and folkways. Finally, Chapter ten places the experience of Scots in New Zealand in a global context. Each chapter challenges long-held stereotypes, explaining why they were created and presenting the realities. One of the main contributions of this book is its successful demonstration of the duality of the Scottish New Zealand experience, one of two conflicting, yet at the same time congruous, cultures--Scottish and British. By primarily employing case studies, this work provides a robust analysis of the ways in which Scots shaped their identity in relation to the land of their ancestors, but also to the land they lived in. Not driven by generalizations based on stereotypes but by quantitative and qualitative data and research, this work provides an unrivalled examination of the Scottish migrant's understanding of themselves in the New Zealand landscape, society, and culture. …

"He thought the Māori did not use their land ...": the Wastelands in 1840s landscape painting [propaganda

The waste lands concept was an important part of the colonial project, gaining particular traction in the 1850s. Its initial implementation in New Zealand was begun in the 1840s, underpinning a strongly economic approach to settlement favoured by the owners and proprietors of the New Zealand Company. In the 2012 version of this symposium I presented a paper that explored how images of New Zealand's landscape in the 1850s could be analysed in light of the concept, with a particular focus on Crown/Māori relationships. Here I extend this analysis into the 1840s – before the heady heights of waste land policy implementation – and test what landscape images from the likes of William Fox, Charles Heaphy, and publications such as Edward Jerningham Wakefield's Adventures in New Zealand can reveal when read through the lens of the waste lands concept.

“A deluge of shrieking unreason”: Supernaturalism and Settlement in New Zealand Gothic Fiction

“A deluge of shrieking unreason”: Supernaturalism and Settlement in New Zealand Gothic Fiction