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Socio-ecological mapping generates public understanding of wilding conifer incursion

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Abstract

Invasive conifers have the potential to substantially alter natural, cultural, and heritage landscapes in many regions. While much work has been done to understand the impacts of biological invasions on ecosystem services such as water regulation and carbon sequestration, less is known about their impact on sites that have significant cultural value. Assessing these values is complicated by the fact that biological invasions are novel in nature. People are unlikely to have experience with the scales and types of change that concern researchers, meaning that it can be difficult to assess how these changes may impact both the way that people value places and also the specific sites that people value. We assess cultural values in the context of wilding conifers in three landscapes in New Zealand. We mix interview and survey data with scientific projections and visualisation tools based on spatial analysis to explore the interactions between the information that people have about invasives and the impacts that they have on cultural values. We find that concern about wilding conifers increases significantly when people are presented with visual, scientifically credible, projections of incursion. This change demonstrates the importance of communicating credible scenarios for biological invasions when considering how they might affect people’s cultural values.

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Notes

  1. The NZ Wilding Conifer Management Group was established in the early 2000’s as a stakeholder oversight group for a research programme on South Island wilding conifers. It grew to take on a wider national level advocacy and advisory role. It is comprised of organisations and individuals interested in wilding conifer management and research. In 2016 a Wilding Conifer Control programme was funded by the NZ government. A revised leadership group has emerged now named the NZ Wilding Conifer Group. For more information about this group see https://www.wildingconifers.org.nz/about-us/programme-partners-structure-and-delivery/ (last retrieved January 2020).

  2. We do not go into detail of the workshop in this paper as we did not seek permission to publish the proceedings, rather a Chatham House Rules approach was taken. The workshop supported free and frank discussion across participants active in each case study region plus central and local government policy and technical advisors. Insights gained from the workshop informed development of the 2016 Wilding Conifer Control Programme.

  3. For further details about the location of each respondent please refer to Table 2, page 18 in the original study report Greenaway et al. (2015).

  4. The six per cent rate of incursion was estimated based on unpublished data by Clayson Howell (Department of Conservation) and from a wilding conifer model (Scion, Ministry for Primary Industries, Contract No. 17234). The six per cent incursion rate was adopted for the interview exercise because it was considered more recent and more accurate than the five per cent estimate used in the earlier surveys.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Sarah Orton and Maria Heaphy (Scion Research) for their contributions to the background research for this paper, and Pike Brown for reviewing the manuscript. We also acknowledge the New Zealand Department of Conservation for funding the original research and MBIE for additional funding to write this paper through the Winning against Wildings programme.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Manaaki Whenua – Landcare Research, 231 Morrin Rd, St Johns, Auckland, 1072, New Zealand

    David Gawith, Alison Greenaway & Oshadhi Samarasinghe

  2. Scion Research, 49 Sala St, Rotorua, 3010, New Zealand

    Karen Bayne & Sandra Velarde

  3. Aardwolf Research Consulting, Hamilton, New Zealand

    Alexey Kravchenko

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  1. David Gawith
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  2. Alison Greenaway
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  3. Oshadhi Samarasinghe
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Correspondence to David Gawith.

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Gawith, D., Greenaway, A., Samarasinghe, O. et al. Socio-ecological mapping generates public understanding of wilding conifer incursion. Biol Invasions 22, 3031–3049 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10530-020-02309-2

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