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• 4.1 - Learning what works versus learning how it works
• 4.2 - Learning by experimental management
• 4.3 - The NSS statement on sustainable land management: a head start already in place
• Table 1: Priority issues for research to ensure sustainable land management as identified by the NSS Sustainable Land Management Strategy.
• 4.4 - The need for research and policy linking the NSS SLM strategy directly to biodiversity

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4 - An Overview of Research Needs And Priorities To Safeguard New Zealand's Agricultural Biodiversity

4.1 - Learning what works versus learning how it works

Some applied ecologists advocate a purely performance-based approach to guiding management. In their view it does not matter why a restorative action works so long as it does. Added research to understand the detailed reasons for success in nurturing agricultural biodiversity is then seen as an avoidable and expensive luxury. The money and time not spent on detailed research can then be applied directly to maximising the earliest possible instigation of remedial action to solve the problem, and environmental enhancement is then achieved over the widest possible area. This approach works well provided a successful tool is found quickly and the nature of the problem or threat does not change.

On the other hand, research on the fundamental ecological processes at work in agricultural landscapes will sometimes be the key to better understanding the nature of problems; to identifying which problems demand top priority for resolution; to suggesting new tools to combat the problems; and especially to explain why a trial solution failed. Analysis of the latter can sometimes suggest modifications of approach that will bring success and recoup the investment in developing the unrefined tool up until then. Investment in research to understand the ecological system can be repaid over long time scales when a previously successful solution no longer works because of changes to the system (e.g., increased avoidance by target species of the control technique) or when a new threat appears. Identification of the solution is hastened by building on the generic understanding of the system. The main problems with understanding ecological systems is their complexity and the potentially never-ending list of valuable questions to research, the difficulty of pin-pointing at the outset which research strands are likely to eventually give the manager's optimal solution, and the unpredictable delay on the return for the invested effort.

We recommend that MAF takes an intermediate course between very applied research to solve tightly defined problems and more fundamental research to understand how ecological processes work in New Zealand's agricultural landscapes. Choice of some highly focused problem-oriented research that could hit on immediate gains for biodiversity in agricultural landscapes should be attempted to build momentum and enthusiasm for biodiversity enhancement. But there is no escape from the need for very much longer-term research to understand ecological processes at work in agricultural landscapes.

4.2 - Learning by experimental management

A sharp distinction between research and management initiatives need not exist. Well designed management programmes, when coupled with stringent monitoring of a replicated group of treatment and non-treatment areas is analogous to a scientific research experiment⁶⁶. "Reliable Knowledge" in wildlife management is ideally based on a hypothetico-deductive experimental science approach to learning what the manager should and should not do, though in practice this is rarely done⁶⁷. This approach is sometimes called "Learning by doing", "Adaptive management" or "Research by Management"⁶⁸.

The principles of experimental management which are integral to the ecosystem approach see learning as continual and coming from all sources of knowledge: local and traditional; research, policy and operations. Applying these principles means that researchers and policy makers have much to learn from each other, as well as from those that live closest to the land, and vice versa. The essential foundation to this approach is that ecosystems including humans are complex, and decisions are always being made within conditions of uncertainty. Given this reality, no department can claim a singular role as a knowledge font on environmental management.

Experimental management is a potentially powerful way forward because:

1. it allows immediate management action (e.g., a start on restoration of the wildlife community) while learning how to modify management in future to improve efficacy and cost effectiveness;
2. actual management applications and teams are put to the test from the outset (pure research experiments often apply perturbations in different ways and changes are forced when the proposed management effort goes into the "real world");
3. the management experiment can be applied on a much more realistic spatial scale (in the order of 10 or 100 km2) than is normally possible for research teams (in the order of 1 or 10 ha) which is particularly important when community restoration is the goal and some of the animals targeted roam widely, or when "edge effects" around the margin of small experimental areas cloud interpretation of the result;
4. managers and scientists work together from the outset to help and learn from each other;
5. the need for standardised and rigorous monitoring methods by management teams is underscored;
6. by the time the optimum solution for management has been identified the management team is already committed to applying the method because they have had a crucial role and responsibility in learning what worked - the solution is theirs and so they are more likely to apply it.

Adaptive management has strong protagonists that see it as a panacea for difficulties in mounting adequate science pitched at the necessarily large spatial, temporal and social scales demanded for environmental management69. Others are concerned to emphasise the limitations of adaptive management⁷⁰. We notice that the label adaptive management can sometimes be used to legitimate very loosely defined standard management approaches that do not maximise learning. A formalised commitment to a replicated design, careful monitoring of management action and environmental results at both treatment and control sites, analysis and review are essential. Treatments (different management applications) must be maintained for sufficiently long to learn the strength and direction of effects. An "active" adaptive approach that uses a range of management interventions to learn what management is best is more powerful than a "passive" adaptive approach where a single management regime is trialed⁷¹.

Just as several challenges and blocks must be removed before people are effectively drawn in to environmental philosophy and management along ecosystem management lines, so there are institutionalised inertia blocks to fully involving people in science and learning in New Zealand⁷². Adaptive management is not yet reaching it's full potential because of a lack of middle-level "process professionals" to facilitate dialogue between scientists, managers and community stakeholders. We recommend that MAF and Regional Councils recruit or train community facilitators to guide adaptive management as a powerful adjunct to scientific research programmes to support agricultural biodiversity.

Learning how to manage and protect New Zealand's agricultural biodiversity using adaptive management will therefore require a high level strategic guidance if it is to be a partial replacement for classic research to fill the knowledge gap. MAF and/or the Regional Councils are natural lead agencies to develop this co-ordination. A few central hypotheses should be selected for test and an appropriate number of proposed treatments selected for representative areas within bio-regions. We see no formalised process in New Zealand so far to organise this type of strategy and fear that opportunity will be lost if several smaller scale management applications are not integrated and linked in the way required.

In view of the urgency to reverse environmental degradation within agricultural landscapes we recommend a middle course between research and adaptive management. More research on blocks and gateways to effective adaptive management is recommended. It is an example of a research gap on an over-arching principle of the CBD that could have generic value to several different research and management topics identified in this review.

4.3 - The NSS statement on sustainable land management: a head start already in place

A National Science Strategy Committee 'Sustainable Land Management' strategy was completed in 1997⁷³. This initiative involved a large number of stakeholder sector groups in a thorough analysis to identify research priorities. It included the necessary social dimension for an ecosystem management approach and adopted many of the explicit principles of the CBD⁷⁴. Much of the strategy direction was taken from the government's "Environment 2010" strategy which in itself involved several officials and stakeholders in intensive planning. The NSS SLM strategy is still sufficiently recent to be up to date and relevant. Regional canvassing of issues was followed by a national synthesis and extensive recommendations for action in the appropriate bottom-up manner. The preparation of the NSSC SLM may have spurred valuable integration behind the scenes or other related programmes, but unfortunately there is no sign of commitment to using the strategy document itself for high level policy formation. It provides a splendid platform to launch a strategy to safeguard New Zealand's agricultural biodiversity, so we have listed its recommendations in Appendix D of this report. We recommend that re-activation of the NSSC SLM strategy statement by MAF should become an urgent priority to capture a cost-effective and rapid start towards a more co-ordinated science planning process to support New Zealand's agricultural biodiversity.

The SLM strategy concluded that the most evident and serious unresolved research issues in sustainable land management which face New Zealanders are either caused by or related to the following:

1. Land Use Intensification
2. Urban Growth
3. Treatment of Wastes and the Effects of Chemical Inputs
4. Weeds, Pests and Diseases
5. Trade Pressures
6. Economics of Extensive Pastoral Systems
7. Transport
8. Tourism, Travel and Leisure Activities
9. Maori Values and Traditional Knowledge
10. Social Impacts and Issues.

The CBD brief for agricultural biodiversity is in some way concerned with all of these, although urban environments are considered in more detail by the SLM strategy. Issues of peri-urban effects and encroachment of cities onto productive agricultural land are of concern to the CBD agricultural biodiversity brief, but they must remain a peripheral priority until more widespread issues in the agricultural landscapes are dealt with.

Two key requirements for better SLM research were underscored - the need for an integrated, inter-disciplinary, systems approach to SLM research, and the need for a longer-term perspective. New Zealand needs long-term research on the physical systems that underpin successful, sustainable management. This means integrated work on soil, water, climate and, importantly, their connecting ecosystems. We need to know more about how our biophysical systems work, what impacts they can withstand, and what the medium and long-term picture looks like. We also need to know how we can arrest damage, remedy the effects of problems, and move to improved systems. This, in turn, must be built on a better understanding of the nature of our diverse biological and physical systems. We recommend that integrated long-term research be the general style of MAF's research portfolio to safeguard agricultural biodiversity.

While knowledge of the biological and physical systems is the basic core, another vital area of research is having more and better information and understanding of the social and economic forces which affect and motivate land users. We also need to know much more about how best to identify users' needs and how to successfully transfer information to users.

The NSS SLM strategy called for research in 7 main areas and 14 sub-areas which it ranked as one of "A" - very high priority; "A/B" - high priority; "B" - moderate priority, or; "C" - low to moderate priority (Table 1). We recommend that the NSS SLM priority rankings are used for determining agricultural biodiversity research priorities, albeit with some important modifications outlined in the next section.

Table 1: Priority issues for research to ensure sustainable land management as identified by the NSS Sustainable Land Management Strategy.

Rank†	Main issue	Sub-issue	Research requirements
A	Soil Biological and Biophysical Processes
A		Land Application of Effluent and Wastes	Investigations of the impacts of land treatment on nutrient balance, assimilation processes, buffering capacity of the soils and soil organisms and ecosystems
A		Soil Quality and Land Use Versatility	investigations of the impacts of current land uses on nutrients, organic matter and physical structure; investigations of the "reversibility" of changes or damage to the physical properties of soils; investigations of changes in organic carbon content and the role of organic matter as a source / sink for carbon; investigations of the social and economic implications of decline in soil quality and particularly the loss of high quality soils to urbanisation; development of a full range of soil quality indicators.
A/B		Soil Structure and Degradation Issues	surveys and related investigations to determine the extent of soil structure and degradation problems; development of management technologies and strategies to prevent structural degradation and remediate poor soil structure conditions; development and application of monitoring programmes.
A/B		Contamination and Soil Quality Impacts	investigations of the life-cycles of important contaminants in soils; development of avoidance and remediation strategies and technologies.
B		Erosion Issues and Impacts	development of models to predict soil stability; identification of soils with high erosion potential; identification of the socio-economic implications of widespread erosion; investigations of the impacts of erosion on soil productivity and long term land use sustainability.
C		Soil Productivity	research on productivity decline resulting from intensification of land use or from a long history of land use which has depleted the soil’s nutrient status.
B		Groundwater Quality and Contamination	investigations which seek to improve the understanding and knowledge of the storage of contaminants in soils and their release to groundwater; investigations designed to improve understanding and knowledge of groundwater flows and dilution effects; development of technologies and techniques to remedy soil contamination; development of groundwater quality monitoring programmes; development of methods to identify groundwater aquifers susceptible to contamination by land use activities.
A/B		Ecosystem Health	development of indicators of ecosystem health; investigations which improve the understanding about the relationships between soil health and the ecosystem as a whole.
A/B	Surface Water Issues
A		Surface Water Quality Issues	review of information on sediment impacts on freshwater streams, rivers and lakes and the marine environment in New Zealand, as well as overseas to determine where research to mitigate impacts should be targeted; investigations of the dynamics and ecological impacts of contaminated sediments; investigations of the impacts in marine areas of increased water turbidity, caused by sediment discharge, and its effects on shellfish, indigenous fish species and phytoplankton; investigations of the relative contribution of non-point sources to nutrient and bacterial contamination in water courses. This should include the contribution from diffuse sources to different components of the pollution load, influence of different land uses, variability of pollution load and cumulative impacts; identification of practical, cost effective mitigation measures to control diffuse sources of pollution, including possible new approaches to managing riparian areas; identification and transfer of overseas approaches and measures for mitigating the impacts of pollutants in urban run-off on fresh water and coastal marine ecosystems.
A/B		Instream Demands and the Influence of Abstraction on Aquatic Ecosystems	investigations of aquatic ecosystem processes and functions; investigations of the instream requirements of native fish and invertebrate species; development of predictive land use hydrological models to forecast the effects of changing land use on stream water yields; determination of the relative uses of water by different, competing users to help establish priorities for water use; development of general rules or guidelines to enable decisions to be made about appropriate minimum flows in different types of rivers and streams; investigations to determine the rate of recovery of aquatic fauna following periods of severe low flow conditions.
A	Weeds, Pests and Biosecurity
A		Ecosystem Functioning and Health; Impacts of Weeds, Pests and Diseases	investigations which improve understanding of the complex interactions between weeds / pests / diseases and the environment to enable improved targeting and development of more effective control technologies and management options; development and testing of integrated pest management strategies and models; procurement of the support of MAF and other Government agencies in the development of a coherent research approach to help exclude weeds and pests from New Zealand and eradicate newly established weed and pest species; identification of the range of taxonomic groups that, on establishment in New Zealand, could turn into major weeds, pests or diseases, even if they are benign in their native habitats; establishment of the susceptibility of New Zealand plants to exotic pest species in overseas habitats (requires establishment of multilateral arrangements between New Zealand science community and its counterparts overseas); development of contingency plans for both the procurement and use of pheromones as monitoring tools; analysis of the full range of pesticides and biological agents available for weed and pest eradication (or control) operations in both urban and rural environments; evaluation of the efficacies of pesticides against a range of taxonomic groups; development of pesticide and weedicide application technologies from both ground and air in order to define their optimum configurations to minimise drift and increase cost effectiveness.
A		Risk Analysis and Modelling	development of computer models in order to accommodate a range of pest phenologies, fecundities and voltinisms under a range of ecoclimatic zones and the use of these models to analyse the resilience of potential pest populations under various biotic and abiotic regimes; development of computer models to analyse the likely effects of genetic bottle necks and stochastic events in founder populations under various biotic and abiotic combinations.
A		Control, Eradication, or Prevention
A/B∂ C		Coordination of Activities and Provision of Information
B	Coastal, Harbour and Estuarine Impacts		investigations which improve understanding and knowledge about coastal ecosystems, the processes operating and their health; investigations which identify those coastal ecosystems at risk from a range of impacts (nutrient and chemical pollution, invasive weeds, pests, bacteria, and sedimentation); development of new systems, strategies and technologies to control or mitigate the impacts of urban and storm water run-off on coastal ecosystems (part of the effort needs to involve transfer and application of overseas information to New Zealand situations).

† Rank for sub-issues ranks within each main issue only.

∂ High priority for operational activities, technology transfer and information dissemination. It has lower priority for SLM research per se.

 

4.4 - The need for research and policy linking the NSS SLM strategy directly to biodiversity

Although the NSS SLM statement is a useful platform on several of the generic issues for understanding the ecological system and its management, much more direct research links to biodiversity in agricultural landscapes from farming practices will be needed to safeguard agricultural biodiversity. The summary of SLM priority issues and research areas⁷⁵ identified loss of biodiversity as one of the three main impacts on land, but this major category was not used to structure research priorities. Instead there is piecemeal reference to biodiversity in some of the research requirements which we have underlined in the 4th column of Table 1. Just 16 percent of the 63 bullet points for research requirements make specific reference to the ecology or biology of plants and animals or more general abstractions like ecosystem health (Table 1). Instead the overall environmental problem is defined predominantly in biophysical or chemical terms which sometimes capture the sources of disturbance or change to the system, or sometimes the outcomes or effects of the changes. For example, although we agree with the high priority placed on soil issues, the SLM's use of abstractions such as soil "quality", organic matter content, structure and structural degradation only capture part of the problem. The soil biota itself is the key determinant of the long-term outcome for these biophysical parameters and in turn will be affected by them.

The scant reference to the biota themselves shows that the SLM strategy has considered mainly human impacts and the habitat effects in physical terms, rather than in ecological terms. This is symptomatic of the fundamental problem of perception of the agricultural environment mainly in production or physical terms rather than recognising the biodiversity (species and processes) as central to the long-term functioning and service provision by the ecosystem or land. Until we research the direct links between the ecology of plants and animals and the landuse practices and management of the agricultural landscapes we will continue to put agricultural biodiversity at risk. The implicit assumption has been that if we monitor and look after the system according to biophysical indicators, either production and/or biodiversity will be saved along the way. This assumption is potentially false, and much bigger gains for biodiversity at reduced social and economic cost may be able to be captured if research on the direct links between agricultural activities and habitat modifications and biodiversity is researched.

The need for the detailed biodiversity information is illustrated by the way vegetation or land use categories are assumed, perhaps wrongly, to capture the essence of biodiversity management. Extensive international research⁷⁶ has confirmed that extrapolation from one narrow taxonomic/functional group to the wider biodiversity of a system cannot be conducted with any confidence because species are ecologically designed for different habitat conditions and thus changing conditions affect different species differently. To be able to evaluate the status and attributes of biodiversity of various vegetation/management systems therefore requires us to document the taxonomic area within which the majority of biodiversity lies.

At present the vegetation systems themselves provide us with our main perceptions of biodiversity and thus form the current basis for its management. CBD commitments are currently being met largely through a reintegration of native vegetation into the agricultural landscape. Strong justification for this approach lies not only in its pragmatism, but also in the close interrelationships known to occur between components of most systems at the temporal and spatial scales of land management. However, we cannot assume biodiversity attributes of systems without first acquiring some knowledge of the comparative status of the majority of biodiversity within these systems. This situation is particularly true in the productive management landscape where systems are formed around exotic vegetation that cannot itself be used to assess attributes of interest to both conservationists and markets, such as endemicity for instance. Thus there is currently a driving need to 'calibrate our perceptions' through standardised documentation of the biodiversity attributes of the vegetation systems that land managers recognise. Both conservation and marketing benefits would result from doing this and the increase in system knowledge would inevitably enable refinements in the management of production systems. As with any managed system, the better the knowledge - the better the potential for efficient (i.e. profitable) management.

Understanding the ecology of the plants and animals themselves, and the way humans affect them is also the fundamental first step to building awareness, support for conservation and changed practice amongst the stewards of the land, the rural community. We cannot expect complete commitment from landowners to change behaviour or sometimes accept denial of short-term economic benefits to secure long-term inter-generational gains if the problem is for ever expressed in abstract concepts of ecosystem functions or processes. We need concrete examples and proof of direct consequences for valued plants and animals of alternative land use options if we are to change behaviour of farmers.

The SLM strategy is therefore too general to make it by itself a sufficient guide to MAF's biodiversity responsibilities. Although we urge that the SLM strategy be used as a platform to launch increased effort to safeguard agricultural biodiversity, we recommend the development and execution of a detailed research agenda that investigates the direct links between agricultural practice and landscape features and the ecology of key animals and plants living in agricultural landscapes.

The next four sections of this report outline the important ecological issues in each of the 4 focal areas designated for the CBD brief, consider the existing research programmes in these areas and identify gaps in understanding requiring new research. A fifth section considers research gaps stretching beyond the four focal areas which we think are potentially crucial for a holistic approach to safeguarding agricultural biodiversity. They include consideration of research gaps on over-arching themes of the CBD and sound environmental management, some of which may have more generic value than specific needs arising in the four focal areas. This section on research needs concludes with a synthesis of the research gap analysis to suggest priorities amongst a depressingly long list of information needs. The NSS SLM prioritisation has had a large influence on the rankings we assigned to research priorities.

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