What’s going on in the Land of the Long White Cloud?

James and Thibaud Aronson post here the first of two reports from New Zealand, where they spent the first three weeks of January 2017, learning about the remarkable restoration and conservation work going on there.

New Zealand, or Aotearoa (Land of the Long White Cloud, as the Maori call it), is one of the world’s leaders in terms of conservation and restoration. However, it certainly did not start off that way.

New Zealand was first settled by Polynesian sailors about 750 years ago, one of the last places on Earth to be colonized by humans. These pristine islands, which had stood in isolation for 80 million years, harbored a wealth of unique lifeforms, from the iconic kiwi (of which few people know there are in fact 5 species), to the weta (cricket relatives in one of several genera endemic to New Zealand, some of which  are among the largest insects in the world), and the tuatara, large, endemic, lizard-like reptiles, the last survivors of an order that thrived 200 million years ago.

The island did not lack predators: just think of the now-extinct Haast’s eagle (Harpagornis moorei), the largest eagle to have ever lived, and the fierce, flightless moa (nine species in six genera; all extinct), giant relatives of the ostrich, the biggest of which stood fully 3.6 meters (12 feet) tall and weighed 230 kg (510 lb). However, Aotearoa harbored practically no land mammals, the only exceptions being two species of bats. Therefore, many native animals were flightless, absolutely unafraid of humans and their dogs, and thus very easy to hunt.

Faced with this incredible boon, the Maori did what humans have done on every single island and continent they have ever reached: they took and took without restraint. All 9 species of moa, the most rewarding of prey, were gone within 200 years. Seals, once abundant along all coastlines, vanished from many areas. Forced to change their ways, the Maori shifted to eating more fish and shellfish, and took to cultivation, burning down forests for cultivation, and also started eating the bracken fern that grew back in abundance after fires. However, and very unusually, having caused widespread extinctions, the Maori eventually introduced rāhui, a strict system of preventing all unauthorized persons  to enter an area, or harvest a specific resource. The intention was to allow regeneration, such as certain animal food sources, or plant materials – such as wood from a certain tree species prized for carving,  thus avoiding local depletion of resources or even further extinctions. This system is still in use today among Maori, and can also be declared by different agencies of the NZ government!

Billy Boy, a Maori guide in the Waipoua forest, whose connections to New Zealand’s wilderness is an essential part of his identity. Whenever one of his grandchildren was born, the first thing he did was to take them to the forest and begin their introduction to the natural world.

However, things took a significant turn for the worse 200 years ago, when Europeans reached New Zealand. They rapidly established large-scale logging activities, targeting the various species of native conifers, which can live for millennia and reach enormous sizes. For a few decades, whaling and sealing were vastly profitable as well, until populations crashed. What’s more, the Europeans brought with them cats, black rats, and later possums, stoats, and other carnivorous mammals. All of these species have since gone feral, and become one of the foremost ecological problems the country faces today. Since human settlement, 47 endemic bird species have gone extinct, about half from Maori over-hunting, and the remainder in the last 2 centuries, wiped out by feral predators, as were various species of reptiles, amphibians, and invertebrates. Many more species have no doubt suffered the same fate, disappearing before they were even documented.

However, in recent decades, New Zealand has made an impressive and inspiring commitment to preventing future degradation and in fact taken many great strides towards rolling-out restoration at a national scale. This merits celebration and emulation. During our 3-week trip, we got to see first-hand some examples of the conservation and restoration work underway.

One of the most iconic trees of New Zealand is the kauri (Agathis australis). These massive conifers once dominated the forests in much of the warmer, nearly subtropical, northern part of the country. They can live well past a thousand years, grow 50 meters tall, and reach a girth comparable to that of the Californian sequoias. The largest individual known today is called Tane Mahuta, or Lord of the Forest, the name of one of the main gods in Maori cosmology. It is hard to describe how insignificant one feels when standing below these giants.

Te Matua Nhgahere (Father of the Forest), the oldest and second-largest remaining kauri in New Zealand. The age of this tree is variously estimated to be between 1200 and more than 3000 years old. Such longevity is exceedingly rare in tropical or subtropical rainforest trees.

The kauri also happen to yield excellent timber, once particularly valued for ship-building. Their logging was only banned in 1972, and less than 4% of the original kauri forests are left today. Happily, no native forest can be legally logged anywhere in New Zealand today, thanks to an election promise of the Labour government which passed into law in 2002.

Waipoua forest, on the north-west coast of the North Island, is the largest kauri forest left in New Zealand. Great efforts are being made today to preserve the remaining stands, particularly focusing on halting the spread of kauri dieback disease, a horrific, recently-arrived fungus-born infection that spreads through soils and kills every kauri tree it infects. Part of the campaign to save the tree entails education and consciousness-raising among all visitors to the kauri forests as to the importance of cleaning their shoes and boots both when entering and leaving the area.

Skeleton of a kauri killed by the dieback disease in Waipoua forest. Can the disease be stopped?

Some forest areas have fared better, such as the Nothofagus forests of Fiordland National Park, in the south-west of the South Island, well protected as they are by billions of biting flies, which have successfully prevented any significant human settlement in the area. However, stoats, rats and possums are not so easily deterred, and the whole area is a prime example of empty forest syndrome.

Southern Beech forest (Nothofagus spp.) in Mt Aspiring National Park.

Therefore, enormous amounts of money are being spent on large-scale trapping and poisoning throughout the country, to try and control these non-native pests which wreak havoc both on native fauna and flora. For instance, we visited the private Pupu Rangi Sanctuary, 100 hectares of forest south of Waipoua, in the North Island. Its owner, Octavian Grigoriu, and a diverse team of volunteers work tirelessly in the forests, maintaining traps and poisoned bait around the whole perimeter of the forest, and deep in the bush as well. Octavian hosts paying guests, which helps pay for the expensive traps and poison. As a result, native species, including the North Island brown kiwi, are doing significantly better than in the nearby Waipoua forest, which is much larger, and therefore exponentially harder to protect effectively.

In sum, all over New Zealand, many initiatives, both top-down and bottom-up, are doing excellent work, which we will discuss in our second blog post.

Octavian Grigoriu setting possum bait laced with cyanide in his privately-owned forest reserve.

 

Little known side of Hong Kong: Conservation and Restoration work at Kadoorie Farm and Botanic Garden (KFBG)

James and Thibaud Aronson made a stop in Hong Kong recently, and post a report on what’s going on restoration-wise at the 60-year old Kadoorie Farm and Botanic Gardens.

After three weeks in New Zealand – about which we will report in our next two posts – we stopped recently in Hong Kong to visit the Kadoorie Farm and Botanic Garden (KFBG), which has just celebrated its 60^th anniversary. Most visitors to Hong Kong never leave the city center, which has the second highest concentration of skyscrapers in the world and rivals London and New York for shopping, but also as a global hub for finance, trading, and marketing. But, we were lucky: through our friend Kingsley Dixon we had an introduction to Dr. Gunter Fischer, Head of the Flora Conservation Department at KFBG. Dr. Fischer came to Hong Kong from Austria, 7 years ago, and now oversees the vast – and gorgeous – botanic garden, the herbarium, the genetic and ecology laboratories and the various restoration and native plant recovery programs at the KFBG, which is the result of an exemplary public sector-private sector partnership. Behind the scenes, a key component is the large on-site tree nursery and enormous amounts of effort devoted to seed collecting and plantations of mother plant collections of rare native tree species for seed production. “In a changing world, resilience comes from diversity”, as Gunter so nicely puts it.

Ms. Chung Yick Kwan, an employee of the garden working in the KFBG tree nursery, handling one of the many rare native species propagated here.

Other departments at KFBG include the Sustainable Living and Agriculture, Fauna Conservation, Kadoorie Conservation China, and Education. Activities are devoted to developing and demonstrating sustainable small-scale farming methods for food production in South China, including new methods such as permaculture and traditional Chinese methods that have been lost or abandoned during the Chinese cultural revolution. There is also an extensive rehabilitation program for wild animals, notably many rare and endangered turtles, mammals, and birds that were seized by Hong Kong customs or delivered by animal rescue organizations.

All of these activities stem naturally from the original raison d’être of the organization. When Sir Horace and his brother Lord Lawrence Kadoorie founded the Farm 60 years ago, their goal was to help Chinese immigrants get established as small farmers.

Sir Horace and Lord Lawrence Kadoorie – the founders of KFBG. (Photo: KFBG archives)

Text of one of the guiding principles of the charity work of KFBG in the early 1950s, which is still valid in the 21st century (NB. In the 1950s KFBG was called KAAA, Kadoorie Agricultural Aid Association). (Photo: KFBG archives)

To this day, the Kadoorie Foundation is the main funding source of the KFBG. But with vastly greater affluence in Hong Kong today, since the mid-1990s, a decision was made to transform the property into a world-class education and conservation center with a botanic garden at its heart. The conservation work comprises numerous projects in Hong Kong and mainland China but also parts of Southeast Asia, such as poorly explored regions of Laos and Cambodia.

Originally, Hong Kong was covered in tropical and subtropical forest, but it was completely deforested after the British took over in 1841; visitors in the 19^th and early 20^th century called Hong Kong a “barren rock”. As a result of centuries of cultivation with crops such as rice and tea, and ongoing urbanization in combination with more and more exhausted soils, many mountain slopes were left to their fate, completely denuded of any vegetation ongoing soil erosion, and high run-off during the annual monsoon seasons caused landslides and wreaked havoc.

Starting in the 1880s, successive governments undertook massive afforestation programs, as documented by the eminent ecologist Richard Corlett. However, during the World War II Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, most of the recently recovered forests were burned or devastated by harvesting of fuel wood.

After WWII, secondary forests began to recover, but of the 450 native tree species, only ca. 100 regenerated naturally, and the other species carry on sadly towards extinction. Moreover, there are huge problems with introduced grasses, many of which carry fire far better than anyone would like.

Upper area of KFBG’s restoration site devastated by a fire in 2004. (Photo: Dr. Billy Hau)

Thus the challenges for conservation and restoration are enormous. Indeed, the same is true at the regional scale. As Gunter told us, “most of the forests of South China have been trashed”; only tiny fragments of primary forest remain, and very little work on restoration of the original forest is going on. Since he arrived at KFBG, over 6 years ago, Gunter has done remarkable things in the botanic garden portion of the 159 hectare property, located on a steep slope of Tai Mo Shan, the highest point in Hong Kong (957 m or 3140 ft), including the launch of an ambitious restoration program on the recovering wilderness portion of the property that few visitors see. Rather than full coverage, a tree island, or assisted nucleation approach is taken, similar to that used in on-going experiments in Costa Rica, which Leighton Reid posted on last November.

Core area of the 15 hectare (42 acre) experiment restoration site at KFBG, showing tree island plantings of 2015 and 2016, with various soil preparation techniques and tree guards being tested. (Photo : Gunter Fischer)

The focus is largely scientific and conservation-oriented, given that most of the flora of Hong Kong is highly endangered. However, horticulture and arboriculture are as important as ecology here, Gunter assures us – an observation that jives well with the Missouri Botanical Garden’s approach to restoration as well. For example, Gunter and his colleagues not only plant ten thousand trees on average each year, all produced in the experimental KFBG nursery, they also prune and shape the trees they’ve planted to encourage upward growth rather than low shrubby formatting, which is what often happens with many trees after planting.

Structurally pruned Quercus edithiae, a rare canopy tree in South China.

A large proportion of the tree planting budget is devoted to plastic cylinders (tree guards/shelters) to protect tree saplings from barking deer and wild boar, but also from harsh climatic conditions.

Tree guards used to protect seedlings on a ridge from strong desiccating winds.

The KFBG restoration team also makes a big effort to study soil improvement techniques that will compensate for degraded soils and improve survival and early growth of the planted trees. One of the most interesting components of this experimental work concerns the use of Biochar prepared on site, by slowly heating wood in closed containers with almost no air. Much of the wood comes from stems and trunks of intentionally introduced and now invasive fast-growing trees, such as the appropriately named Acacia confusa, that are gradually being removed from the property. This approach to invasive woody weeds has great potential in many parts of the world and should receive a lot more attention and investment.

Invasive trees and those deemed hazardous to human safety are continuously removed and replaced with native species. The wood is used to prepare biochar.

Clearly, KFBG is one of the bright spots of plant and animal conservation, and ecological restoration in Asia today.

Native animals such as this bamboo pit viper (Trimeresurus stejnegeri) are recolonising the restoration site. (Photo: Gunter Fischer)

For more information, see the recent article published by Gunter and his colleague Jinlong Zhang. Also, if you’re travelling to Hong Kong, be sure to stop by. Even if you don’t trek to the higher slopes to see restoration work-in-progress, the Botanic Garden is also full of interesting natural and cultural sights and stories too, such as these elevated pigeon hotels. And how many botanical gardens occasionally have to close a road because a massive python is stretched right across it, digesting a deer for a week!

Dragon boat pigeon hotel on the KFBG grounds.

And there is the museum, theme gardens such as the Gloria Barretto orchid sanctuary, and lush forest gardens that appear to be native forest fragments but in fact are tropical gardens providing an exhilarating experience for thousands of visitors each month just a few miles from downtown Hong Kong.

Montane streamside forest garden with trees covered in epiphytic ferns.