Seeking examples for our Queenstown Lakes District restoration pathways workshop (2022 NZPCN conference)
Seeking examples for our Queenstown Lakes District restoration pathways workshop
Alex Fergus, Adam Forbes, Ben Teele, Jesse Bythell, Rebecca Teele
The NZPCN are excited about the opportunity for our 2022 conference to generate an additional output beyond the general engagement and knowledge sharing resulting from a conference format. We are inviting all conference participants to contribute stories about their restoration experiences in the Queenstown Lakes District region before the conference. We will collate and review these stories with the goal of producing a synthesis document which focuses on restoration pathways.
We have been collating examples from published and grey literature which document restoration efforts in the Queenstown Lakes District area, but now we want to cast the net wider. If you are currently or have formerly been involved in a restoration project in the Queenstown Lakes District region we ask you to consider submitting a restoration story. Stories can be anonymous, and while it would help to have specific locations, these details can be omitted if you provide us with specific details of local climate/terrain. If you have multiple examples, we encourage you to submit a story for each.
We want to make this process simple, and fast, hence there is a template provided. Please complete as much of the template as you can, and if you have queries, or want MS word or any other versions of the template don’t hesitate to get in touch with Alex. Please submit your restoration stories before the conference, and preferably sooner rather than later.
It’s important to note that we are interested in all facets of restoration, the full continuum from unassisted (natural) recovery to intensively assisted recovery (we’re focusing on the intervention continuum of Chazdon et al. 2021 as opposed to the active/passive restoration dichotomy). Putting that in a Queenstown Lakes District perspective, perhaps you’ve observed the first broadleaf forest species recruit into a patch of local mānuka scrub without any help, or near the other end of the continuum, perhaps you’ve blocked drains, rewetted paddocks, removed willows and planted intensively to convert pasture back to wetland. Our scope is wide. Projects will also be very different in terms of time, some may only be a few years old, some might stretch to decades. And we want to hear about both successes and failures, both are equally important.
All stories will be reviewed along with existing literature, and we will endeavor to draw out commonalities. In a workshop-style format on Tuesday afternoon of the conference we will work as a group to synthesize these commonalities, identifying areas of oversimplification or adding examples that have been missed. At this stage it’s tricky to pre-empt the nature of the output of this work. One option would be to generate simple state-and-transition diagrams for different ecosystem or vegetation types, identifying transitions and the factors that did (or did not) impact on them. The broader goal would be to identify successful pathways that could guide future restoration work in the region.
No matter what the output, all conference participants, and all story contributors will be welcomed as authors on the final synthesis document which will be published in Trilepidea and as a standalone document that will be available to download for free from the NZPCN website.
Please submit your restoration stories to Alex () or get in touch if you have any queries. Download the template here.
References:
Chazdon, R., Falk, D., Banin, L., Wagner, M., Wilson, S., Grabowski, R. & Suding, K. 2021. The intervention continuum in restoration ecology: rethinking the active‐passive dichotomy. Restoration Ecology. 10.1111/rec.13535.