Ecosystem Health & Mauri

Ngāti Kuia - Cultural Health Monitoring

Ngāti Kuia, with support from Our Land and Water, has developed a tool to assess the mauri of restoration efforts in Te Hoiere, especially Ruapaka Wetland. As one of the aspirations woven into Te Hoiere Project, the team researched other cultural health monitoring tools in Aotearoa to design a unique one that upholds Ngāti Kuia values. The tool, Te Kupenga ā Kuia Mauri Assessment, aims to provide a unique Ngāti Kuia perspective on the health of te taiao, enabling tangata whenua to record and monitor changes over time. This will allow Ngāti Kuia to track the effectiveness of their restoration efforts. Ngāti Kuia has been out in the field trialling monitoring techniques that may complement Te Kupenga ā Kuia, including the use of eDNA tests to trace the presence of species in the water. Testing has shown the presence of dwarf galaxias, shortfin tuna, inanga, and grey teal. Ngāti Kuia have used the same methods in the Whakamarino (Wakamarina) as well, showing the presence of various taonga species which all builds a baseline knowledge of each wai.

The second stage of this project is to upskill kaitiaki to use the tool.

Read more about this work with Our Land and Water here.

Ecological Integrity - Department of Conservation

Department of Conservation collects environmental monitoring data as part of the Ngā Awa river restoration programme. Eleven sites on public conservation land were used to measure indicators of ecological integrity.

Ecological integrity measures the health of an ecosystem by considering how native, pristine, diverse and resilient it is. This monitoring looked at indicators and measures of integrity classed into three high-level categories:

• aquatic life (including fish, macroinvertebrates, megainvertebrates, aquatic plants and periphyton)
• habitat (including habitat types, discharge, substrate stability and deposited sediment)
• water quality (including nutrients, other water chemistry data and visual clarity / suspended sediment).

All results indicated good water quality and that the catchment within public conservation land is a good point of reference for restoration efforts in other areas of the catchment. Aquatic life scores suggest there is high biodiversity across the sites. Similarly, the habitat and water quality measures were generally indicative of pristine conditions.

Read the report here:
Ngā Awa Monitoring Programme: Te Hoiere Catchment Reporting 2021–22

Below: Photos show biodiversity monitoring in Te Hoiere by Cawthron Institute; six native and two introduced species were caught using electric fishing, including tuna (longfin eel) pictured here