Botanist Newsletter

Issue No. 13, October to November 1997

Botanical site assessments of Ecological Heritage Sites are continuing.
The following sites were visited this month:

• EHS 26.02 (Tors Reserve)
• EHS 30.12 (Windsor Castle)
• EHS 27.04 (Castle Rock)

A report on this monitoring project is available to CCC staff in l:\botany\ehs_mntr.doc.

There is an application for forestry near to Marleys Hill. This could effect two Natural Areas (22.01, 22.02). Further detail on these sites was provided to EPPU. There seems to be some confusion for many staff between Ecological Heritage Sites (EHS), Natural Areas (NA) and Recommended Areas for Protection (RAP). The definitions are discussed in the EHS monitoring report mentioned above.

An application has been made for rezoning several land parcels in the Hoon Hay Valley. Subdivisions’ attention was drawn to the fact that there is an EHS on the site (EHS 21.19).The Open Polytechnic in Lower Hutt is writing a report to the Ministry of Forestry regarding the value of the urban tree estate in New Zealand. Information on the urban tree resource in Christchurch was provided.

This month there was a joint CCC/CRC committee meeting where the landscape plan for McLeans grassland was presented. Support for the concept was shown by most of the councilors present and more detailed work by EPPU has been requested.

We now have a permit for collection of plant material from DoC - this allows me to collect small amounts of plants from DoC reserves, for the purpose of plant identification.
A number of plants were identified and recorded.

There was a workshop on Environmental Monitoring and Management Applications, which was part of the AURISA conference held in Christchurch this month. The workshop was presented by five staff from LandCare. Of particular interest was the directory of information sources that they have compiled from staff throughout their organisation, and then made available on an intranet.

Several thematic maps of Bottle Lake Forest and Kainga Forest were compiled, for inclusion in a management plan.