Philippa Stevenson: Grants enable clearer look at lakes and bush

It's great to report good news for two environments that have tended to feature for their bad news: lakes and bush restoration.

Thanks to a win this month under the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology natural ecosystems investment process - a rare funding channel last tapped about 1998 - two Waikato University scientists are hugging themselves with delight.

Professor David Hamilton is the lead researcher on the degraded Rotorua lakes. Thanks to the fund, he will have $10 million over the next 10 years to devote to a cause close to his and the nation's heart.

"It's really exciting," he said yesterday, sounding like he'd just won Lotto. "It's a once in a lifetime opportunity to develop a core of people who will have the understanding to better manage New Zealand's lakes.

"There's the education element, too. We'll put out a new generation of people who can restore ecosystems and also educate the community about the consequences of what may once have been considered normal actions, like transferring fish between lakes."

Biological sciences department chairman Bruce Clarkson could have won the lottery with a round-the-world trip thrown in he was so pleased by the university's success in a funding round in which most of the rest of the $31 million awarded annually for up to 12 years went to CRIs.

Clarkson won $1.6 million over four years for one of his favourite projects, the restoration of natural ecosystems in cities. The research will build on Hamilton City Council's experience of restoring the 60ha- Waiwhakareke (Horseshoe Lake) Natural Heritage Park in the city's north-western suburbs.

"All the work so far on [Hamilton] gullies and Horseshoe Lake has been voluntary and on the weekends. Now we can do scientific measurement, build a whole monitoring process and come up with the best recipes that can be applied to other cities in New Zealand."

The park now is just grazed farmland surrounding the degraded lake. Restoring it is the ultimate scientific challenge, Clarkson said.

"As an ecologist you have to ask how we reconstruct ecosystems from scratch. Does it matter in what order we put the pieces - birds and animals - back?"

Nationally, biodiversity loss has been greatest in or near cities and settlements. Hamilton has 0.1 per cent of its original natural vegetation remaining, and around the country there are more than 3000 community restoration projects under way.

"We know from observation that some things do better than others, but that is not backed up by good restoration science. Best practice is not often followed, and there is no coordinated monitoring to ensure progress is actually occurring," Clarkson said.

The project should come up with a blueprint for restoration that can be applied around the country.

It's a similar story for the research planned for the Rotorua lakes, Hamilton said. Pest fish and weeds, toxic algal blooms, and the super enrichment of the lakes known as eutrophication occur nationwide, and findings from studying Rotorua and Waikato lakes will be widely applicable. In fact, lakes everywhere are in such a state that the scientists will have the special challenge of seeing their research findings adopted on the run.

"We haven't got the luxury of just observing," said Hamilton, who isn't worried that speedy measures may precipitate more disaster because of the large body of data already available on Rotorua lakes.

"Some actions are quite obvious, like controlling the level of nutrients going into the lakes," he said, adding that unless action is taken on some lakes soon it will be too late for them anyway.

It's now known that because of a lag time - the up to 80 years it takes for nutrients to percolate through groundwater - lake conditions will inevitably get worse before they get better, no matter the remedies immediately taken.

To that arresting thought, Hamilton adds that lakes such as Rotoiti and Rotorua already have as many nutrients being released from chemical activity in their oxygen depleted bottom sediments as is flowing in from surrounding catchments. In other words, even if all nutrient run-off was stopped yesterday, the lakes' chemical factories - factories built by our hands - would continue the harmful enrichment process.

It is sobering to consider that lakes are on the environment's bottom rung. They are the ultimate receptacle of what we do and have done on the land. Yet for more than 30 years the scientific study of lakes has been on a downward slide, from a peak of 25 research papers published a year in the mid-70s to about four now.

We can only hope the foundation funding will mean that statistic is about to turn around and that our lakes follow.