Kelly D'Mello (MSc Student, AUT)
In 2018 I supervised Kelly's undergraduate research project on the spatial distribution of community restoration projects in Auckland, and she did a really awesome job putting together a huge database of projects and doing some neat GIS analyses. She has kindly agreed to write up her findings for the blog. While we weren't able to find clear spatial patterns this time, she did an amazing job cataloging these projects, as previously we had no idea where community restoration was being carried out. Her post gives an overview of her results and what her findings mean for NZ conservation. Thanks Kelly!
Jen
Last year I embarked on a year-long project investigating how social factors such as; median income, population density and average school decile influence the occurrence and distribution of community-run restoration projects in the wider Auckland area. What excited be about this project was the prospect of understanding some of the factors which motivate people to actively participate in projects since the importance of ecological restoration is widely promoted in New Zealand.
Community riparian planting at Friends of Te Wairoa Catchment, one of the projects in the database. Photo courtesy of the project Facebook page.
Upon starting, I made two surprising observations, the first being that there weren’t many existing studies of this kind. This was interesting as to me there appeared to be an obvious link between these social factors, funding and available participants for projects.
Second and more unexpectedly was that there was no single restoration database that contained information about all the active groups in Auckland and the work they were carrying out. Having this information was vital to my research so my first step was to create the community projects database. Like any good millennial, I took to social media in the search for restoration projects. I began by looking on websites like Meetup and Seek volunteer and Facebook, and after some Nancy Drew-level detective work the database was started. A large portion of data was received from the Auckland council for groups they partner with and private farmers. Actually acquiring this data was harder than anticipated, as we got passed around many council departments and the data was all in different formats and contained different information so took a lot of time to sort through.
After months of searching, the final database comprised 329 projects in total, 310 of which were in the study area (insert map, red shading) across 21 community and local boards in the wider Auckland area. Location of restoration activity is indicated by red pins.
Managing the database and finding projects was no easy task as the primary form of contact for many groups was emails, so I only found out about them through word of mouth or from community magazines. This likely makes it harder for new members to join projects and makes ongoing monitoring more difficult if existing members leave.
The database revealed that Rodney and Franklin had the highest number of active projects (61), followed by Waiheke (37) and some statistically significant hot spots were identified in Upper Harbour, Henderson-Massey, Orakei, Howick, Mangere-Otahuhu and Otara-Papatoetoe. Analysis of the influence of social factors on number of projects was carried out with a negative binomial GLM, but I found no evidence of an effect of social factors on the number of projects in a community board (p-value > 0.01). It was likely the lack of clear patterns were due to the limitations in the coverage and sourcing of the data. Another possible factor that I was not able to consider but that might be important, is proximity of green spaces in the area.
Bar chart of the number of projects in the database per community board.
In terms of the types of activities being carried out, planting was the most commonly conducted activity (260 projects), followed by weed control (57) whilst track maintenance the least common (7 project). Whilst this does reflect the government biodiversity goals, this probably mainly reflects bias in how data is recorded.
Bar chart of the different conservation activities carried out by each project, divided into community boards.
Whilst the results didn’t show any clear social effects it got me thinking about additional qualitative factors that affect occurrence and success of projects that we didn't investigate, such as: proximity to green spaces, emotional connection to the land, and the efficiency and motivation of regional managers and organisers.
So, where to next? I think the biggest take away is that we need a comprehensive, nationwide database which details what projects are happening and where. This can only be achieved through the support of the local and regional councils and requires communication and co-operation at all levels. Restoration and the preservation of nature is integral to the cultural identity of New Zealand and, whilst it may sound cheesy, in order to achieve long-lasting positive outcomes for projects everyone needs to be on the same page and work together.
Final note from Jen: Kelly is now focusing on other work for her MSc, but another student in our department is working on expanding upon Kelly's database for the whole of New Zealand. Hopefully we will soon have a much clearer picture of the state of community restoration in NZ!