Symposia & special sessions

In this workshop session learn how to create a short video on your smartphone that communicates your research to the wider world. Participants should expect to be planning, filming, and editing their own footage during the workshop and will leave with the skills to create their own video abstracts or summaries. 

This workshop is expected to take place over ~3.5 hours as an offering in the conference programme. 

Date: 1/12/2022
Time: 11 am - 12.30 pm

Bring:

• Mobile
• Laptop or tablet with ‘I-Movie’ (Mac) or ‘Video Editor’ (Windows – default on windows10) 
• Cable to connect phone to laptop. 
• Abstract or summary of research (either completed, or underway). 

For eons, the natural light-dark cycle has provided highly consistent and predictable cues that have guided behavioural patterns of many species. Over the last decades, the emission of artificial light at night (ALAN) is increasingly disrupting these natural patterns. ALAN is increasing faster than any other anthropogenic change, and its impacts include direct mortality by attraction, habitat loss, changes in daily and seasonal timing and effects on the food web. While most of Aotearoa New Zealand is still cloaked under darkness at night, many urban, semi-urban and rural and natural terrestrial and aquatic environments are increasingly lit at night. The understanding of the impact ALAN on most of our species and their interactions is still limited. This symposium will explore the latest research into the effects of artificial light at night (ALAN) on the environment in Aotearoa New Zealand and beyond. It will also seek strategies to ensure continued access to the night sky.

Bioacoustic monitoring has seen a tremendous increase in conservation applications throughout the world in the past few decades. This is due to the technological advances as well as the greater spatial and temporal coverage of passive acoustic monitoring. However, New Zealand has not embraced this technology fully despite its huge potential. The field of Bioacoustics is multidisciplinary and requires expertise from at least a few different fields. This symposium is for conservationists, scientists, engineers, academics, practitioners, and anyone who has used bioacoustics for wildlife monitoring in New Zealand to share their experiences, methods, and challenges. This symposium is for sharing knowledge and for encouraging more bioacoustic applications in New Zealand through collaboration for monitoring our fauna and achieving our goal towards a predator-free 2050.

With the genomics revolution, the field of conservation genetics has undergone dramatic changes. Technologies once confined to international consortia are now accessible to many research groups within Aotearoa New Zealand.

Yet, it remains difficult to connect conservation genomics insights directly with species management. There are communication difficulties and knowledge gaps. Further, academic timelines are drastically different from policy-making and conservation management plan calendars.

This symposium will first be a space to share conservation genomics research in Aotearoa New Zealand. It will also include a panel discussion to create conversations across the broad range of people involved in species management and to move towards more integration of the use of genomics into species conservation.

Coastal People Southern Skies Centre of Research Excellence has a mission to support to connect, understand and restore coastal marine ecosystems of NewZealand (NZ) and the South Pacific through transformative research, local action and by unlockingpotential through utilising new pathways to learning.  This symposium will share stories of the development of community led research in CPSS.  The challenges and value of true research partnerships and the pressures to provide meaningful local responses to climate change in the marine space will be a focus of this proposed symposium.

Ecosystem impacts of tree pathogens: Tree pathogens directly harm their hosts by causing symptoms like root rot, canopy thinning, and eventual dieback and death, but they can also have ecosystem-level impacts beyond the host tree. Ecosystem impacts may alter the activity and distribution of other above- and belowground organisms that carry out a range of crucial ecosystem functions. These large-scale effects likely occur via multiple mechanisms, such as changes in litterfall and litter chemistry, altered plant-soil interactions, decomposition processes, primary productivity, and different carbon and nutrient cycling. To fully grasp the extent and severity of these ecosystem consequences, we need a better understanding of indirect pathogen impacts on forests. New Zealand forests face major threats from tree pathogens, especially myrtle rust and kauri dieback. 

Environmental weeds can have major negative impacts on biodiversity and ecosystems and pose significant management challenges in New Zealand. This symposium will bring together a broad range of speakers and perspectives to present the latest research on environmental weeds.

In these times of unprecedented global change, drastic declines in abundance and diversity of invertebrates are being observed globally. In Aotearoa, our unique invertebrates are subject to many of the same pressures faced by larger, more well-known plants and animals, yet they rarely receive the same level of attention. Our symposium will highlight research on native terrestrial invertebrate ecology, behaviour, and conservation efforts to protect these species. 

There have been extensive declines and extinctions of native fauna in Aotearoa New Zealand since human settlement. Against this background of loss there have been remarkable advances in conservation management, particularly in the large-scale eradication and control of exotic mammalian pests. Pest control creates opportunities to return species to former habitats via conservation translocations, an important tool for conservation management. A successful translocation always results in the establishment of a population but defining successful establishment can be difficult because it encompasses many values, including ecology, culture, society, economics and politics. Here, we present a series of talks spanning what we consider to be critical components of successful translocations in Aotearoa NZ. Specifically, these talks will include the use of effective and inclusive decision-making tools in translocations, how we can improve predictions of the impact on source populations, the likelihood of establishment and dispersal following translocations, the role of predator thresholds on translocation outcomes, the inclusion of neglected taxa such as threatened plants, invertebrates, and herpetofauna, and finally, the difficult topic of mitigation translocations. We conclude with a horizon scan on the future of translocation in Aotearoa New Zealand. 

Palaeoecological techniques have revolutionised our picture of prehistoric Aotearoa New Zealand, how this ecosystem functioned, the impacts of climate change and human arrival, and how we can use this temporal information to conserve taonga species (e.g. conservation palaeontology) and restore ecosystems. In recent years techniques have included ancient DNA, radiocarbon dating, stable dietary isotopes, palynology and plant macrofossils, and archaeology, increasingly in combination with mātauranga Māori. This symposia will focus on how these palaeoecological tools have shaped our understanding of prehistoric Aotearoa, how it’s changed and what the future may hold. 

Pest impacts are the key driver of biodiversity loss in New Zealand, and conservation to date has been unable to halt the decline. The Predator Free 2050 mission was launched in 2016 as a flagship response to this issue, with many other initiatives likewise stepping up. Our symposium will highlight key insights from ecology underpinning such efforts, and the pest management and biodiversity outcomes already being realised, while acknowledging the wider-reaching changes needed to safeguard Aotearoa’s biodiversity into the future.

This symposium will have talks that are focused on pollination, at a higher level to include aspects of pollination such as flower initiation, pollen movement, pollinator attraction, pollinator behaviour / effectiveness, and seed production and dispersal. The pollination topic is of relevance to the themes of this conference as pollination is the requirement for the next generation of plants and food that insects and animals depend on. While talks about pollination within agricultural settings and food production will no doubt be present in the symposium, an emphasis on the fundamentals of pollination biology and pollination outside of agro-ecology will also be present and encouraged.

New Zealand has led the world in eradicating introduced mammals from islands. Cattle, sheep, goats, cats, rabbits, rats and mice have all been removed from subantarctic islands. Auckland Island is the last and largest New Zealand subantarctic island with invasive mammals. Pigs, cats and mice have been present for 200 years. In 2018 the Department of Conservation invested 3 million dollars in the Pest Free Maukahuka (Auckland Island) project to undertake a three year R&D program to determine feasibility of eradicating all 3 species from Auckland Island. This symposium will provide a historical overview of mammal eradications from the New Zealand subantarctic region and then present the results of the three year Auckland Island research program and the process for arriving at the costed feasibility plan for eradication. The symposium also launches the 2022 special issue of the New Zealand Journal of Ecology on the same topics.

Urban areas are complex, heterogenous environments that are highly influenced by people. While cities can contain high species diversity, they can also be hotspots for invasive species and pollution. The current trend for housing intensification within cities in Aotearoa is likely to exacerbate biodiversity loss. Individual decisions made by developers and householders can have major effects (positive and negative) on urban ecosystems. For some people, cities are the only environment they experience, yet biodiversity is unequally distributed in cities. Given the recognised health and wellbeing benefits of nature, there are multiple benefits to increasing the connection between people and nature. Despite current intensification efforts, there are a multitude of opportunities to increase urban greening, green infrastructure and biodiversity within cities.