Conservation Comment: Experiment yes, but huge

Sanctuary: Bushy Park, one of New Zealand's leading forest sanctuaries, an experiment in community-led conservation, says Peter Frost.

By Peter Frost

WILDLIFE sanctuaries as an experiment in conserving nature?

Communities in New Zealand are taking part in a country-wide experiment. It isn't planned, and those involved may not even see it as an experiment, but it is one nonetheless. Its outcomes should help answer the question: Can community-based conservation contribute significantly to stemming the decline in the country's native biodiversity?

Around New Zealand, there are more than 80 sanctuaries, reserves or other wild areas, covering almost a quarter of a million hectares. There are also around 4250 QEII Trust covenants, protecting a further 165,000 hectares of native forest, bush and wetland. Some of the sanctuaries and reserves are on freehold land, or land held under Maori customary title, either as individual blocks or ones that the landowners have amalgamated for conservation purposes. Many of these are managed by volunteers. Others are regional parks or reserves on Crown land, with volunteers working alongside council or Department of Conservation staff. This community involvement is helping to offset shortfalls in labour and funding.

Much of the money from the community is used for infrastructure development and equipment. It comes from philanthropic individuals, family trusts, large and small businesses, some public funds, and from the volunteers themselves. A search through the Charities Register showed that in 2015-16, the income of around 60 environmental trusts amounted to almost $18 million (of which nearly 90 per cent was spent in the same year), a substantial investment by ordinary people in conservation.

So why is this an experiment? Experiments are designed to answer questions or test ideas, and there are many of both in this endeavour. We don't yet know what it takes to sustain this voluntary commitment, not just for a few years or even for a few decades, but permanently. At its heart, conservation is concerned with ensuring that other species have the space and freedom to live and continue to evolve (even if their evolutionary pathways will be shaped to varying degrees by their interactions in a greatly human-modified world).

Will these reserves remain as they are now, pockets of urgent activity to create and maintain that space, or can we look forward to a future when circumstances improve in surrounding landscapes, and these reserves, instead of being refuges, become sources of native species recolonising wider landscapes? Some species already are doing this, for example, kereru, kaka, tui, and New Zealand falcon. Can this be expanded and replicated? Can surrounding landowners become more involved, perhaps intensifying their own pest-control efforts, revegetating less productive areas of their farms, or allowing others to do so? What part will these reserves play in achieving the vision of a largely predator-free New Zealand by 2050?

Can governments, both nationally and regionally, be persuaded to see community initiatives as having more than just local relevance? Taken together, they surely contribute substantially to conserving important elements of New Zealand's biodiversity. Many community-managed areas now support thriving populations of threatened or near-threatened species; for example, Bushy Park, which has species such as tieke and hihi, birds that you won't find outside sanctuaries.

If community-based conservation is an experiment, then we must document its outcomes, both its successes and its failures. It isn't sufficient just to measure the inputs: money raised and spent; infrastructure erected; volunteer hours worked; even pests killed and weeds cleared. Are these activities having a positive effect on native biota? Is ecosystem integrity being reinforced and maintained? Are people's attitudes to nature being strengthened? It is the outcomes of experiments that count, not just the procedures that they comprise. Applying the lessons learned from them would surely reinforce conservation efforts, making them more resilient.

�Peter Frost is an environmental scientist working as a volunteer at Bushy Park to help conserve our native biodiversity.