It seems that not a day goes by without climate change in the news media. I follow Greta Thunberg on Facebook and love and admire her stand. During our recent biannual Trust meeting in Wellington we adjourned our meeting for a couple of hours to join the climate march on Parliament with 40,000 others. It was an amazing experience.

It is generally well accepted that the projected effects of climate change such as warming seas, sea level rise, increased intensity of coastal storms, increased climate extremes such as drought and flood events are going to be much more than the watered down projections as predicted by the IPCC.

The Coastal Restoration Trust’s view is that we must invest in creating dynamic natural buffers along our shores that ebb and flow with the cycles and seasons.

Mō āpōpō, mō ake, ake tonu rā.

For tomorrow, for the future, through the eons of time.

See you at our conference in Murihiku Southland.

Ngā mihi nui

Greg Bennett
Chair

We've just opened registrations for our conference Coastal Treasures of Murihiku Southland (18-20 March 2020) and for a while the early bird catches a discount so go ahead and book soon!

Please read all the information on our website before booking your travel as you may want to join us at the free pre-conference workshop and/or the Stewart Island trip afterwards. We are taking bookings for Stewart Island on a first-paid, first-in basis as we can only take 16 persons, so speed may be of the essence if you are keen to go.

If you want to see all the information click on the poster.

If you want to go straight to the registration form for our main conference, go there.

We look forward to seeing many of you there.

The Coastal Restoration Award recognises the team work and tenacity to motivate people to work together to achieve “on the ground” results. The award is generously sponsored by Coastlands Plant Nursery.

The deadline for nominations for next year’s award is 31 January 2020.

If you are involved with a coastal restoration group that you think is doing great work, or you want to nominate a group or project that is, please go to our website and fill in the nomination form.

The purpose of this scholarship is to provide funds to assist with an individual’s post-graduate level research to improve knowledge in the field of coastal restoration. The study award is usually $2,000 plus expenses to travel and present at the Coastal Restoration Trust Conference.

The deadline for next year’s award is 31 January 2020. Please go to our website to download the Award Information and Award Application Form to check the details and apply.

Our 2014 scholarship recipient Mike Fake recently got in touch with us. After a few detours in his life he finally finished his thesis this year.

Here an abridged version of his conclusions:

In my study, I compared good honest field work data to that gathered via Remote Sensing (aerial imagery). Due to the physical and biological complexity of Kaitorete Spit, my broad-scale imagery data for the site was only really useful at detecting coarse-scale habitat and vegetation features and patterns. Large significant species were able to be identified with a strong degree of confidence, however small or rare species with low detectability proved more complicated. Low detection can result from things not being able to be found in the field, but also a failure to properly locate them in the imagery.

Gathering high-resolution data could be a solution. However, while this may be feasible for small scale studies, for a site such as Kaitorete Spit, which is quite large, the handling, storage and processing of such large datasets are usually out of reach for small community groups.

Read his full story here.

Read his full thesis here or on our database.

I have been working on cleaning the data that I was able to retrieve from past authors. Cleaning data has been time-consuming, but it is an important step because the old datasets need to be consistent for it to be compared against my current data.

From my research in data discovery, I have learnt that it is easy for data to be lost due to multiple reasons. Studies have shown that the older the paper, the chances of obtaining data decreases exponentially. Therefore, it is important to consider not only uploading the raw data in an online data-sharing platform but also attaching the meta-data to the information.

I’ve also been writing my descriptive chapters researching more into the history of the Avon-Heathcote Estuary and the complex relationships the site has undergone in the last 200 years.

Read TK's full story here.

The Bird of the Year competition is on again and we want to encourage you to vote for some of our shore birds. There is of course the rarest bird in the world, the fairy tern (photo), but also the rare and recently described Whenua Hou diving petrel, the shore plover, dotterels, penguins and albatrosses who deserve your votes.

This time it is run like an STV election and you get to vote for up to five birds.

Go here to vote and to learn more about all of our birds.

Photo by Jordan Kappely

All these recently added papers and much more can be found in our database.

• J Fischer (student award 2016)  Contrasting responses of lizard occurrences to burrowing by a critically endangered bird
• M Fake (student award 2014)     Unmanned Aerial System derived Multi-Spectral Imagery for the Monitoring of Coastal Dune Plant Communities
• R Johansen (student award 2013)             A native and an invasive dune grass share similar, patchily distributed, root-associated fungal communities
• Page, N. et al - Status Report on Coastal Sand Ecosystems in British Columbia

The latter is a foreign but NZ relevant report.