DECEMBER 2024 & JANUARY 2025 NEWS

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Author: Mels Barton

Post Date: January 31, 2025

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Quarterly Update

Ngā mihi o te Tau Hau / Happy New Year from Kauri Rescue!

We hope you had a peaceful, fun and relaxing holiday with your loved ones.  The Kauri Rescue team have had a very busy January issuing treatment kits to new landowners as well as supporting some of our earliest adopters to reassess and re-treat trees that are showing new symptoms. If you’d like to find out if your trees need re-treating please contact Mels.

 


Join us at the Wetland Festival at Matuku Link, Saturday 1st of February

Please join the Kauri Rescue team at Matuku Link, 111 Bethells Road, Te Henga / Bethells, West Auckland on Saturday 1st February from 10am to 3pm for the annual Wetland Festival. We will have an information stall and Dr Mels Barton will be leading a guided walk and talk on how to keep our kauri healthy at 11.15am.

Matuku Link joins World Wetlands Day with their annual Wetland Festival. It’s always a fun filled family day with games, stalls, food, guided walks, bird talks, bug hunts and more. There will be two family activities every hour and ample time to chat to all the other conservation groups.

There will be an all day market with coffee, food, art and information from Forest & Bird Waitākere, Birds New Zealand, The Entomological Society, Whitebait Connection, Kauri Rescue, Auckland Council Biodiversity, Auckland Zoo, Pest Free Waitakere Ranges Alliance (PFWRA), plus the Matuku Link famous home baking and BBQ (vegan and non-vegan).

We’d love you to join us on this special day. 111 Bethells Road, Te Henga, West Auckland. All free and all welcome – hope to see you there!


Join us at the Āwhitu Tiaki te Whenua Day on Sunday February 16th

Please join the Kauri Rescue team at the Āwhitu Tiaki te Whenua (Landcare) Day on Sunday 16 February from 10am to 12.30pm at the oval carpark, Āwhitu Regional Park. We are joining a number of other environmental groups hosted by Ngaati Te Ata Waiohua and Aawhitu Peninsular Landcare.

All free and all welcome – hope to see you there! For more information contact landcare@awhitu.org.nz


 

Re-treatment is rolling out

We are now rolling out our Re-treatment Strategy for landowners who treated their trees more than 4 years ago and we have had a good uptake from landowners already this summer.

Landowners will need to reassess the health of their trees, using our simplified methodology, to establish if some of them have recurring symptoms and need to be re-treated. This is a quick process taking only a minute or two per tree and once we have seen the results we are issuing treatment kits so those trees needing a boost of phosphite can be re-treated.

If you would like your trees to be part of this re-treatment programme please let Mels know.

Photo: Mels Barton

 

 

We need your donations to support our work

As every community and charitable organisation is finding, times are tough, and Kauri Rescue is no exception.

Auckland Council is continuing to support our work, for which we are immensely grateful, but this has been at a much reduced rate both last year and this year. This means that the effort that we can put in to supporting new private landowners to join the programme, as well as helping current landowners to reassess and re-treat their trees, will be limited by our reduced funding.

Every little helps. So if you are able to support us with either a one-off or a regular donation, then we will be able to do more work. Commercial partners are most welcome to contact us to discuss how we can work together.

If you appreciate the work our charity does to help you improve the health of your kauri then please consider making a donation or becoming a partner. You can do this easily via our website.

Thank you for your support.

Photo: Mels Barton

Treatment Tools Evaluation Report Online

The report of the results of our Biological Heritage Science Challenge Saving Our Iconic trees / Ngā Rākau Taketake funded project to follow the fate of trees previously treated with phosphite is now available on our website. There is also a set of summary slides from Dr Ian Horner’s presentation of the results. You can download the full report or just the slides from the Resources page of our website. It makes for very interesting reading and shows that our use of phosphite is having a very positive impact on infected kauri that is lasting for a period of at least 3-5 years before they need to be re-treated.

Photo: Heather Paterson-Shallard


International Union of Forest Research Organisations (IUFRO) Phytophthora Conference 2024

In September in Paihia, Bay of Islands, the world’s leading Phytophthora scientists gathered at their annual international conference to present to each other their latest research. Our project leader Dr Ian Horner presented a number of papers, including one about the Kauri Rescue project and our citizen science approach. Ian, Mels and Lee attended the conference and learned at lot about the ways in which other Phytophthora are impacting native species around the world.

One of the most interesting and important papers from our point of view was presented by Shannon Hunter, who has been doing fieldwork for her PhD on one of our landowner’s properties in Waitoki. Shannon’s work looks at the impact of phosphite via treatment of individual trees on the communities of Phytophthora in the soil around those trees. What she has found is that phosphite not only reduces the symptoms of disease in the treated trees, but also reduces the inoculum load in the soil around the treated trees. This is important because it shows that treating trees also helps to protect the trees around them by reducing the levels of the pathogen in the soil. You can download the book of abstracts from all the papers at the conference if you want to. Shannon’s paper is called “Impact of phosphite on the Phytophthora community and inoculum abundance in treated kauri (Agathis australis) in New Zealand native forests” and is on P51 of the document.

Photo: Mels Barton

Thanks to Key Industries

A big thank you to Key Industries for supplying us with enough phosphite for all our operations this year. This is the third time they have donated all our phosphite needs and we are enormously grateful for their ongoing support.

Mels went over to their offices in Rosedale to collect the phosphite from their Upper North Island Key Account Manager & Technical Representative Ian Clark.

Photo: Key Industries


Thanks to our funders

The Kauri Rescue™ team want to extend a huge THANK YOU to our major funders who have continued to support our project.

Auckland Council’s Natural Environment Targeted Rate continues to support our work helping Auckland landowners for 2024-25.


Lotteries has funded a project to help Kauri Rescue build relationships with iwi/hapū and landowners in Northland and the Kaipara.

Watercare Services Ltd has committed to an annual funding grant for the next 10 years to support our work in the Waitākere Ranges.

Foundation North have funded a small project to help support our collaboration with Te Roroa and to help build relationships with other iwi/hapū in Northland.

 

Community Organisation Grants Scheme (COGS) have funded a small digital project in Northland.

Tiakina Kauri continue to support us by funding mana whenua to work with us in specific areas.

If you or your company would like to support our work please get in touch.