Dr Alexa Byers, Professor Amanda Black and PhD student Mesu Tora looking at agroforestry systems in Fiji.
January not only marked the beginning of a new year, it also marked the beginning of a new tranche of research for Bioprotection Aotearoa. Since 2021, Bioprotection Aotearoa has been generating the new knowledge and capability needed to support a fundamental shift towards increasing the health and resilience of our productive ecosystems to pest, pathogen and weed incursions.
Our next tranche (2025 – 2028) builds on and extends the learnings from the previous 3.5 years and concentrates our efforts on the themes and collaborations that are proving most fruitful. Here’s a taste of the next tranche of research projects due to be launched.
Bioprotection Futures
Bioprotection responses are increasingly complex, involving numerous people and agencies, alongside rapidly evolving tools and technologies. Management is often reactive, fragmented, and narrowly focused on a species or locality, with responsibilities spread across institutional and property boundaries.
There is a need to holistically rethink what bioprotection is, and could be, in Aotearoa to better connect existing practices and catalyse new approaches that meet the demands of the future. This project aims to understand how bioprotection is envisaged and enacted in Aotearoa, analyse the relationships and processes that underlie existing and emergent bioprotection responses, and identify approaches that can enhance environmental stewardship amidst the growing uncertainty and complexity of bioprotection challenges. The project will use a mixed methods approach that draws from research techniques across the environmental social sciences.
Resilience Agroforestry for Pacific Communities
Agroforestry systems enhance community resilience to climate change through the provision of diverse products such as food, fuel, fodder, fibre, medicine, and ecosystem services. In Fiji, agroforestry is recognised as a land management system balancing goals of environmental conservation with the socio-economic needs of communities. This project aims to identify and understand how sustainable agroforestry can contribute to climate change adaptability and community resilience in Fiji. The project will accomplish this by analysing the economic and social implications of agroforestry for smallholder farmers; identifying emerging pathogens within agroforestry systems; identifying practices that enhance seedling recruitment and biodiversity; and identifying critical pathways for invasive weeds.
Future Biocontrol
Biocontrol systems are attractive tools for combatting invasive species as they can be self-sustaining, they do not require damaging chemicals, and they do not often use genetic modification. However, we now know it is possible for pests to evolve resistance to insect control agents, something that was previously thought to be impossible. Investigating the factors that influence biocontrol systems will assist in finding ways to ensure biocontrol agents we have already released are as effective as possible. This project will generate knowledge that will help ensure that any new biocontrol systems are fit for purpose and that we understand the long-term evolutionary and ecological consequences of that biocontrol.
Discovery and development of our next bioprotection tools
As climate change produces more frequent and extreme weather events, the impact of plant pathogens (bacterial and fungal) is predicted to increase. One broadly applicable solution against any bacterial pathogen are bacteriophages. The current conceptual approach to maximise the efficacy of phages while minimising the emergence of phage resistance is to use a cocktail of phages. However, this approach does not consider the consequences of applying multiple phages to the target pathogen in the presence of the complex microbial community.
This project will conduct fundamental research that will seek to identify the impacts of phage-phage and phage-microbiota interactions on the efficacy of phage-based biocontrol. It will also explore opportunities to characterise and apply phage defence systems for bioprotection.
Identifying new and emerging microbial threats across landscapes
Indigenous pathogens are a major component of biological diversity. They play key roles in nutrient cycling by releasing nutrients from biomass, and they regulate populations and plant community diversity. Even so, pathogens can be highly problematic either through acute outbreaks or by chronic effects on ecosystem productivity. This project aims to: improve and better integrate tools for the detection of emerging threats, background pathogens and potential pathogens; quantify the “pathogen tax” on productivity of current and past ecosystems; and understand how pathogens may constrain (in the context of afforestation) or otherwise impact land-use change.
Farming for Resilience
Soils are key to regulating the climate because they hold three times the amount of carbon than the atmosphere. Increasing organic carbon or organic matter storage in soils enhances the resilience of ecosystems to climate change by sequestering greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, improving soil structure and water retention, and maintaining functioning soil microbial communities.
This project aims to enhance soil ecosystem resilience by focussing on carbon sequestration and stability. The project will examine the effect of different land uses on soil carbon stabilisation; understand the mechanisms underlying impacts of cover crops on carbon input and carbon stabilistion across land uses; and determine the depth and the stability of deep soil carbon.
Critical pathways of weed invasion across heterogenous landscapes.
The current paradigm for addressing the problem of plant invasions in New Zealand has failed. The current approach, whereby management focuses on specific species or sites has led to a fragmented approach across the country.
This project proposes a paradigm shift in the way plant invasions are viewed by taking a landscape approach. Specifically, this project will examine plant invasions in a series of contrasting landscapes to determine the role of linear features (e.g., roads, rivers, walking tracks) and land use types in the distribution of common and emerging alien plant species in relation to their species traits. The project will also identify the rate of spread of selected alien plant species in these landscapes. The project hopes to use this information to develop systematic surveillance strategies that can be applied by government agencies and local communities to detect emerging weeds.
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