Green thumbs up

By ALICE SHOPLAND

Bec Stanley was just 24 when she got her dream job. Five years on, being the botanist for the Department of Conservation's Auckland office is still her dream job.

She's the first person to hold the position, and has spent much of the first five years surveying different areas of the region to discover which native plants are growing here and which are threatened.

Now it's a matter of keeping tabs on how different species are faring and deciding where resources should be allocated.

With 170 threatened plant species in Auckland - 70 of them classified as nationally rare - that's no mean feat. At the moment the mistletoe family is top of the list for rescue work.

The green-flowered mistletoe, for example, is rare everywhere but especially in Auckland because so much of the region's land has been developed.

One of its few sites, for example, is at Mahurangi where the new motorway is proposed to cut right through.

So Stanley's role is to negotiate the best deal possible for the mistletoe at its existing site and, if the site can't be saved, do her best to relocate and propagate the plants.

Stanley studied botany at Victoria University and spent two years working in the herbarium at Te Papa, a sort of plant library with boxes of pressed plants for identification. She chose botany because she's "passionate about conservation, and rare plants are one area that hasn't received as much attention as birds, insects and sea mammals - even though without the plants, nothing else could survive."

She spends about half her time in the Auckland office and the rest out in the field surveying and liaising with DOC field staff - none of whom are plant specialists - and amateur conservationists.

In February, for example, she visited Pakiri to help with plant identification. The sand dunes had been fenced to keep out cattle, and Stanley was thrilled to find 12 plants of a rare sand tussock that she says hadn't been seen on the mainland for 100 years.

Similar discoveries are made each a year, but patience is a necessary virtue in this business. She surveyed the west coast from Waitakere to New Plymouth earlier this year for the coastal forget-me-not. She found 1500 plants, but would often walk for up to five days without a sighting.

Going Bush


The Auckland Department of Conservation has about 75 field staff who work from area offices at North Head, Warkworth and Great Barrier and do everything from catching parrots and pest control to building tracks and assisting with plant surveys. DOC also relies on a number of contractors for similar work.

Ian Bradley at DOC says staff and contractors have all levels of training and experience, including some who have done periodic detention in the field and found inspiration for a new career in conservation.

The Auckland Regional Council also employs a botanist.

Plant specialists are in demand from environmental consultants for their expertise in producing reports for resource management applications.

Going West


Sarah Gibbs, 27, is northern conservation officer for the Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society. Her advice to others wanting to work in plant conservation is "be prepared to travel - because it's mostly contract work and it could be anywhere!"

Gibbs, who has an masters degree in environmental science from the University of Auckland, spent a summer working for Landcare Research "running around the Southern Alps counting plants" and has had two internships in the United States.

In 1994 she helped monitor rivers in Alaska, and in 1997 she worked with the US Forest Service in the Nevada desert.

She warns that for local contract work applicants usually need to be available to start work in September when the season starts, and there's very little contract work over winter.

But there's always a huge demand for volunteers in the office and in the field, to help with administration and more hands-on tasks like helping maintain the reserves for which different Forest and Bird branches take responsibility.

Bec Stanley also says volunteers make her task more achievable. Community groups, amateur botanists and land owners help with information about new plant sightings as well as providing muscle in the field.

"Awareness of rare plants is growing," she says, "but making a real difference for the plants will only happen if the whole community gets behind it."