Native Forestry Report and Webinar - Post-quake Farming Project

Kia ora koutou,

The project report for the native forestry component of the Post-Quake Farming Project (the PQF project) is available at the link below.

The PQF project is a work programme to assist the hill and high-country farming community of the northeastern South Island to recover from the November 2016 Kaikoura earthquake event. It was designed to recognise the skills and understanding that farmers have to manage land and make complex land use decisions, also to support extension and actions to develop better information on the potential of the land resource. 

The issues identified in this report have wider implications for Aotearoa and are relevant to shaping of future policy around permanent forestry and also the content and structure of future forestry grant programmes.

You are invited to a webinar on this work, which will be presented by Dr Adam Forbes. Please see the details for this below. 

The essential points of the native forestry report are:

1. There is widespread and genuine interest from landowners in having and restoring native vegetation on private land. 
2. The historical extensive clearance of old-growth forest across the 420,500 ha project area means seed sources are widely depleted and enrichment planting is an applicable forest restoration requirement.
3. Anecdotal evidence indicates that feral deer populations are growing, and this will increasingly impact forest health.
4. Most potential for landscape scale forest restoration is found in managing regeneration (passive/lower cost) rather than planting native seedlings (active/higher cost). 
5. There needs to be a greater emphasis on passive restoration interventions such as land retirement and reversion, effectively managing feral browser populations through community collaborations, quality ungulate-proof fencing, grant rates adequate to support land retirement, and enrichment planting. 
6. Landowners require more ready access to technical advice on native forest restoration and greater levels of financial support for native forest establishment.
7. Establishing new forests without addressing existing threats faced by the existing forests (e.g., detrimental browser levels) makes little economic or ecological sense.

Please feel free to access and download the project report from this folder: https://forbesecology-my.sharepoint.com/:b:/g/personal/adam_forbesecology_co_nz/EV5CpJNxaj9Pmgsmv9GJJZ0Bc84ed8Uc-06i5fXA_zD5kQ?e=lq85NB

It would be excellent to have you join the webinar, which is scheduled for 31 March from 12-1:30 pm. If you have questions or comments in advance, then please email them to Adam adam@forbesecology.co.nz so they can be addressed during the webinar; there will be question time also. Please RSVP for the webinar to adam@forbesecology.co.nz along with your preferred video conference platform (Zoom or MS Teams).

Please forward this information/invitation onto others who may be interested.