The Hurunui / Kaikōura / Marlborough earthquakes of 2016 left some hill country farms in the area with up to 40% of their land unusable. Buildings, waterways and access roads all threw the farms into disarray. The Post-Quake Farming Project has been a three year programme looking at land use of farms in the area and build in diverse revenue streams, making the farms and the area stronger and more resilient to future challenges.
The project report for the native forestry component of the Post-Quake Farming Project (the PQF project) is available postquakefarming.co.nz/pqf-study-on-indigenous-foresty-dr-adam-forbes/.
Adam is hosting a webinar on this 31 March from 12-1:30 pm.
Please RSVP for the webinar to [email protected] along with your preferred video conference platform (Zoom or MS Teams). If you have questions or comments in advance, then please email them to Adam [email protected] so they can be addressed during the webinar.
The issues identified in this report have wider implications for Aotearoa and are relevant to shaping of future policy around permanent forestry and also the content and structure of future forestry grant programmes.
The essential points of the native forestry report are:
1. There is widespread and genuine interest from landowners in having and restoring native vegetation on private land.
2. The historical extensive clearance of old-growth forest across the 420,500 ha project area means seed sources are widely depleted and enrichment planting is an applicable forest restoration requirement.
3. Anecdotal evidence indicates that feral deer populations are growing, and this will increasingly impact forest health.
4. Most potential for landscape scale forest restoration is found in managing regeneration (passive/lower cost) rather than planting native seedlings (active/higher cost).
5. There needs to be a greater emphasis on passive restoration interventions such as land retirement and reversion, effectively managing feral browser populations through community collaborations, quality ungulate-proof fencing, grant rates adequate to support land retirement, and enrichment planting.
6. Landowners require more ready access to technical advice on native forest restoration and greater levels of financial support for native forest establishment.
7. Establishing new forests without addressing existing threats faced by the existing forests (e.g., detrimental browser levels) makes little economic or ecological sense.
Please RSVP to Adam directly to attend 🙂
PQF study on indigenous foresty: Dr Adam Forbes | Post Quake Farming
postquakefarming.co.nz
PQF Native Forestry Report_Final.v1
