What Drives Forest Regeneration

A native plant restoration workshop attended by 70 people was held on Friday at the Invercargill Working Men's Club in the morning. A trip out to Otatara Community Nursery followed in the afternoon.

There is a report here.

I went to the workshop and learned a great deal about some very interesting trials and experiments underway around NZ to find faster and cheaper ways to get native ecosystems established. It was the best workshop/bus trip/field day I've been to since moving to Southland in 2014. It had a lot of meat in it. Hopefully, there will be more like this in future.

• Dr Brian Rance of DOC gave a talk on "Right Plant Right Place"
• The highlight for me was a talk by Dr Kiri Joy Wallace, a scientist from Waikato University. Here is a link to a PDF of her presentation.
• There is more information available about the People Cities Nature research programme at Waikato University.
• DoC is also experimenting with direct drilling of seed

Her talk asked the right questions and is based on a monitoring programme of 20m x 10m plots around NZ measuring;

• Basal Area.
• Canopy Openness.
• Soil Temperature Fluctuation.
• Herbaceous Weeds.
• Humidity Fluctuation.
• Tree Regeneration Density.
• Epiphyte Density.

There are a number of these plots around Invercargill. Here are 3 of Dr Wallace's slides from the talk.

Tracy and I are currently establishing a monitoring programme at Mt Chocolate to watch and study what happens over time as the bush regenerates and evolves into a Miro Swamp Forest. And we are also doing a lot of experiments with different propagation, planting, and maintenance methods to see what works best.

There are 3 broad zones at Mt Chocolate.

• The north end is sunny and dry with thin clayish soil.
• The middle is shady, cold, wet and sheltered from the wind with deep peat soil. It floods a lot in winter.
• The south end is exposed, damp and windy with organic soil.

Adding a plot in each zone similar to the People Cities Nature programme could add a lot of insight into understanding natural processes present. A friend Matt is going to help with setting up the plots in winter. We will have to make up some gadgets as well to help make the measurements. Aunty Google will no doubt come up with plans for gadgets.

The afternoon field trip to Otatara visited a plot at Bushy Point and the Community Nursery. It was a really useful day.