Highlignts
Aurora Gaxiola and Peter Williams in the Andes discussing weeds. Image - Ian Dickie
SCImago Institution rankings
The SCImago SIR World Report 2011 covers 3042 research organisations worldwide and is the most comprehensive ranking of scientific output. The latest edition covers five years, from 2005 to 2009. We were ranked 3rd in New Zealand among CRIs and universities, with a normalised impact of 1.54, which means our publications have an average scienti.c impact 54% above the world average (=1).
In respect to the number of articles published in the top 25% SCImago ranked journals relevant to our research, we are in 7th place for New Zealand CRIs and universities. We are 4th with respect to international collaboration – 49.1% of our publications over the 5-year period had overseas co-authors.
‘Excellence Rate’ is a measure of high quality output – we have moved to 1st place in the Oceania rankings, with 20.9% of our publications included in 10% of the most cited papers within our scientific field.
Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity & Ecosystem Services
In collaboration with DOC, we organised a workshop and meetings on GEO BON (Group on Earth Observations – Biodiversity Observation Network) and its application to IPBES (Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services). GEO BON participants are coordinating a global network that gathers and shares information on biodiversity, provides tools for data integration and analysis, and contributes to improved environmental management. More than 90 governments have agreed to establish IPBES as the leading global body providing scientifically sound and relevant information to support more informed decisions on how biodiversity and ecosystem services are conserved and used around the world. The workshop was attended by Landcare Research, NIWA, Scion, Lincoln University and the University of Lisbon based GEO BON coordinator of the Terrestrial Species Working Group. The coordinator was very impressed with New Zealand’s efforts, particularly those of DOC and Landcare Research, in leading the measurement of biodiversity status and trend, and for our expertise in biodiversity informatics.
Biodiversity partnerships with Chile
In February, we signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Instituto de Ecología y Biodiversidad (IEB), a consortium of biodiversity expertise across six Chilean universities that is funded by the Chilean Government science and technology agency CONICyT. This will facilitate cooperative biodiversity research. The temperate regions of Chile are very similar climatically and geographically to New Zealand. The shared Gondwanan origin of both land masses means that we have some strikingly similar biota (e.g. southern beeches (Nothofagus) dominate cool-temperate rainforests in both countries). The two countries also face similar problems of biological invasions (e.g. invasive gorse and broom), and some Chilean plant species are invading New Zealand. The two countries also face similar land-use-intensification pressure on native biodiversity. Following signing of the MoU, a group of our ecologists worked with their Chilean counterparts on a synthesis of plant invasions common to both countries, and to develop protocols for shared work.
Our visit to Chile was supported by CONICyT.
www.conicyt.cl
Partnerships with Chile in greenhouse gas modelling
In another CONICyT-supported project, we are working with the National Institute of Agriculture (INIA Rumehue) and Universidad de la Frontera to help strengthen Chilean capacity in greenhouse gas research, particularly in relation to agricultural systems. We were invited ‘International Experts’ at the FAO and FONTAGRO International Workshops on 'Limitations and challenges for the improvement of the livestock sector greenhouse gas inventories' and ‘Defining protocols for the determination of nitrous oxide emissions’ organised for South and Central American countries; and at several other conferences for Chilean researchers and policy staff. This work has provided a regional fertiliser-emission-factor value that is almost 1/10th of the current default IPCC value used in the Chilean greenhouse gas inventory. In addition this could be reduced by 50% by adding nitrogen inhibitors.
Collaboration with China
We have completed a 2-year joint project with the Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography in Urumqi and the Partner Institute for Computational Biology in Shanghai. The project was on the impacts of climate and land-use change on grazed ecosystems. It had three components: (1) review the global problem of grazing impacts and climate change in predominantly natural ecosystems; (2) review how seasonality, palatability and selection by grazing animals modulate plant communities ; and (3) quantify ecosystem carbon balance, using existing measurements at the Fukang Station of Desert Ecology in Xinjiang and models developed by Landcare Research. The project was funded under the China–New Zealand Strategic Research Alliance.
Under the NZ–China Environmental Cooperation Agreement, MfE and its Chinese equivalent (the Ministry for Environmental Protection) have facilitated exchanges between Landcare Research and the Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Sciences to build research collaborations on invasive species, biodiversity and climate change. We have agreed on four priority areas for collaboration: (1) systematic conservation planning; (2) risk assessment for invasive species; (3) systems approaches to managing environmental change; and (4) soil carbon.
Some of this work was supported by MBIE International Relationships Funding.
New Zealand Agricultural Greenhouse Gas Research Centre (NZAGRC)
The role of NZAGRC is to develop technologies for New Zealand to meet its international greenhouse gas emission obligations without reducing agricultural output. The centre comprises nine organisations, funds national collaborative research, and promotes international engagement through the Global Research Alliance. We are leading research to maintain and enhance soil carbon storage and reduce nitrous oxide emissions in grazed grassland systems, particularly dairy farming. The science is challenging but is progressing well because of the collaborative, best-teams approach.
We are combining long-term measurements at field sites with increasingly sophisticated computer models to investigate processes that (1) regulate denitrification (to reduce nitrous oxide emissions) and (2) soil carbon inputs and losses. For the former, we are developing and testing molecular and gaseous measurement methods to identify pathways to nitrous oxide production to manipulate the biological processes and accelerate complete denitrification and reduce nitrous oxide emissions. For the latter experimental manipulations, we are coordinating research undertaken by the University of Waikato, AgResearch and Massey University using swards of mixed grass species (instead of the more conventional ryegrass), introducing exotic worms, and applying biochar in experiments to test the effectiveness of increasing carbon inputs, incorporating and retaining carbon at depth in soil.
This multi-agency work will lead to practical methodologies that can be adopted by farmers to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The DNDC Global Network
Our long-standing collaboration with the University of New Hampshire based developer of the DNDC model has facilitated our development of the New Zealand specific version (NZ-DNDC). Our NZ-DNDC model is used overseas to estimate nitrous oxide emissions from grazed grasslands, and now we host the Global DNDC Network (~90 active subscribers) that facilitates ongoing collaboration.
Our expertise with the DNDC model led to our involvement with NZAGRC to help develop a nitrous oxide emission module for incorporation in a farm systems model. During 2011/12, we hosted researchers from Chile, Japan and UK, all of whom wish to collaborate on DNDC modelling for application to their country-speci.c agricultural management systems. Recently we have also been approached by the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, University of Sao Paulo Brazil and INIA (Chile), to visit and develop collaboration on greenhouse gas modelling projects.
Veg-X
Veg-X is the draft international exchange standard for plot-based vegetation data, the development of which has been led by Landcare Research. These standards will enable plot data over extensive spatial and temporal gradients to be integrated and analysed in order to model vegetation change and dynamics at local and global scales.
This year, there has been a major international effort to implement Veg-X. The Botanical Information and Ecology Network (BIEN) is a network of researchers interested in global patterns of plant diversity, function and distribution. The central goal is to understand the determinants of the past and present plant distributions and abundance. This knowledge is essential for predicting how species, vegetation and agricultural crops will respond to future climate changes. The BIEN team is working to assemble a demonstration project that includes most of the premier plant biodiversity databases for the Americas. By the end of 2012, they will have produced a single resource giving species names, locations, and often abundances, for about 25 million species’ occurrence records.
BIEN has been using Veg-X to facilitate the mapping of plot data to a common schema as they move closer to the ultimate goal of uniting an ever-growing pool of plant distributional data with information on plant co-occurrence, ecology, traits andphylogeny.
Our contribution uses Core-funded research.
Knowledge-Based Bio-Economy (KBBE)
As part of suite of collaborations under the European Commission’s Knowledge-Based Bio-economy (KBBE) initiative Landcare Research is leading discussions on potential collaborative opportunities with Australia, Canada and the European Union around sustainable agriculture and water use. The collaborative initiative will initially involve a stocktake of the technologies being developed in each country, the methods used to facilitate their uptake within agricultural practice, and the areas ripe for further collaboration. As part of the project, New Zealand is also supporting a researcher to travel to one of the partner countries to attend a conference and visit relevant institutes.
Supporting New Zealand’s Official Development Programme
This year, we provided technical assistance to the Governments of Fiji, Ecuador and Korea, and to national park managers in Ethiopia, relating to the development of national carbon accounting systems that comply with UNFCCC guidelines for gaining credit for carbon sequestration under the Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries (REDD+) framework.
Under contract to Biosecurity NZ (now part of MPI), we continued work on developing an online pest identi.cation system (PaDIL) for quarantine services in five Pacific Island countries. We supported a number of capacity-building initiatives with Pacific regional organisations University of South Pacific and IUCN, including cost–benefit analyses to prioritise pest control across Pacific Island Countries.
With MFAT, we completed our pilot programme to develop sustainable livelihoods for poor inhabitants of two river catchments in Ecuador’s Cotopaxi Province. Outcomes include hydrological monitoring for more equitable water management, biocontrol of pests and diseases, and projects to provide alternative sources of income (e.g. alpaca production, organic vegetables, and medicinal plant production).
We assisted SPREP with assessing the feasibility of ‘integrated financing strategies’ to help meet Fiji and Samoa’s obligations under the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification. The global agreement encourages participation of local people in combating land degradation in arid and dry lands across the world, and in fighting poverty through improved soil productivity.