As part of a paper on marine protected areas (MPAs) that I'm taking this semester, we went to Leigh and Long Bay to experience two of the most iconic no-take MPAs in the country. It was a great opportunity to experience first-hand the impacts of these two reserves but also to learn about the challenges and difficulties they are currently facing. Plus we were lucky enough to attend great talks by marine conservation legends Roger Grace and Tony Enderby among others.
I have been doing some work reviewing the literature on marine protecte areas (MPAs) and how effective they are in protecting mobile species. This recent paper from White et al. (2017) demonstrates how large MPAs are capable of providing a high degree of protection, although incomplete, to mobile pelagic species such as the grey reef shark.
Although it feels like as yesterday, it has been over a year since I started uploading observations into iNaturalistNZ. I thought it would be cool to export all my NZ Dotterel observations and visualize them in a compelling way. There are certainly heaps of ways to do this but for this particular case I decided to use a density map. I reckon it is a good way to help raise some awareness about these wee birds at Piha.
Shorebird breeding season in Aotearoa NZ is almost here and I thought it would be helpful to share some tips from previous years. Last season Sean and I had to deal with a nasty bunch of black-backed gulls here in Piha that predated the eggs of a pair of northern NZ dotterel / tūturiwhatu we were monitoring. This is what we did to prevent it from happening again.
I first learned about the case of the passenger pigeon, Ectopistes Migratorius, when I read "Resurrection Science" by M. R. O'Connor, which by the way I highly recommend. I did find the case extremely interesting due to its special circumstances and I ended up choosing it as the main topic for an essay about de-extinction of species.
The Marine Debris Tracker app allows users to record observations of marine debris items by offering a simple set of fields that users can fill with the particular information of the observed item, such as the material of the debris item and the quantity of it. In this post I present an analysis of the results collected between the years 2011 and 2018.
