Community groups concerned about Central Otago’s landscape are sprouting across the district. Jono Edwards talks to those who are sowing the seeds to restore some of its native ecosystem.
The schist formations of Central Otago were once accompanied by swathes of native trees such as kowhai.
Alexandra-based Landcare research scientist Grant Norbury said that all changed once humans arrived.
Early Maori burned much of the forest when hunting for Moa as they passed through, and European settlers finished the job by clearing it for farmland.
"Even before Maori arrived, just after the last ice age, there were tall trees and forests in some of the areas. The climate was quite different."
Central Otago’s landscape has been drastically altered since that time by both human intervention and climate change, but in recent years several community groups have emerged across the district to try to repair some of the damage.
Dr Norbury is chairman of the Central Otago Ecological Trust, which runs the Mokomoko Dryland Sanctuary, near Alexandra.
It has a 0.3ha fenced enclosure, which was built in 2009, and an additional 14ha area which was fenced in November 2014.
The small enclosure houses about 20 Grand and Otago skinks, but none have been introduced into the larger area yet.
Its goal is to make the area predator-free and reintroduce rare native skink populations.
"We’re waiting on some progeny. There has been progress, but it’s a slow process," Dr Norbury said.In the meantime, it was submitting to the Department of Conservation (Doc) to also house green skinks, jewelled geckos, possibly the locally extinct tree weta and maybe even tuatara.
A key part of the job of volunteers is weeding pest plants and reintroducing fruit and nectar-bearing natives so the skinks will have a habitat in which they can thrive.
A group dedicated to introducing native plants in the district is the Clyde Railhead Nursery.
It began as a small project on Doc land two years ago, but an agreement and some seed money from the department earlier this year allowed it to expand.
It now houses plants in two main structures next to the Otago Central Rail Trail.
The volunteers search for native seeds, usually on farmland, before germinating them, picking them into separate pottles and hardening them by exposing them to the elements.
Nursery spokesman Bill Nagle said he loved Central Otago’s native plants because of their resilience.
"But kids are growing up here without experiencing them.
"My main concern relates to climate change and how we are going to need to need resistant ecosystems."
Surveys showed there were once microclimates of beech tree and matai in the area, he said.
"But we are concentrating on hardy, dryland plants.
"I don’t think full restoration is possible, because we don’t know what’s missing. What we do know is that a lot of the plants that were here were tough.
"Many of the plants they found, most people in Central Otago would have never seen," he said.
The nursery gives the plants to community groups to plant in public areas.
Mr Nagle said it mostly gave them to groups Cromwell, Clyde and Alexandra, but there were a couple of people in St Bathans also inquiring.
Keep Alexandra Clyde Beautiful is involved with such plantings, including some native flax on Lookout Rd near the Alexandra Clock.
Member Beverley Thomson says the "challenge is huge" in restoring Central Otago’s landscape.
A Cromwell group, The Mokihi Trust, was established in February.
It spawned from the Te Kakano Aotearoa Trust, which has a nursery in Wanaka.
Among other projects, it wants to get native plants growing all along the Clutha River.
Mokihi Trust chairman Mike Barra said the group had "a growing number of volunteers".
It has had four planting days resulting in 480 native plants growing at a site called Richard Beach.
The group was keen to expand into other areas in the Cromwell Basin, Mr Barra said.
Among their plantings are kowhai, native flaxes, pittosporum, ferox, lancewoods and olearias, given to them by both the Clyde and Wanaka nurseries.
A challenge for advocates of native plantings is invasive species such as thyme and the pernicious wilding conifers.
The Central Otago Wild Conifer Control Group was incorporated two years ago to help deal with the problem.
Chairman Chris Pascoe says while it would love to see them eradicated, its goal is to bring them to a point where landowners can control them.
Using helicopter lancing and digging them out by hand, the group has cleared thousands of hectares between Cromwell and Naseby.
Rather than their water-sapping properties, the main reason the group wanted to cull the trees was to aesthetically restore the landscape, which was in "serious jeopardy", he said.
"Most of the trees are on private land, so the problem we face is getting landowners to see it as a problem."
However, the future was bright for their project.
The group has $800,000 for the next financial year from central and local government explicitly for killing the trees.
"In the last six to eight months there has been a change in the wind, where more people are taking it seriously."
This optimism is shared by Mr Nagle.
"There are so many more people now aware of what’s happening and who want to help.
"If I start seeing kereru around here then I’ll know we’ve succeeded."
