‘All of us have a duty of care’

A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.

A Ngati Porou hapu-led research project will receive a funding boost of over $1.2 million to monitor the spread of myrtle rust and its impacts across the East Cape region this year.

Myrtle rust is a wind-borne fungal disease that can infect taonga species such as pōhutukawa, rātā, mānuka and ramarama.

“We drafted, designed and are now going to carry out the project,” said Ngati Porou researcher Tina Ngata.

The initiative, named Te Whakapae Ururoa: Community Myrtle Rust Surveillance Project in Tairawhiti was funded by the Department of Conservation as a part of the Jobs for Nature programme.

“The research is much needed as we noticed that myrtle rust was prevalent here in the East Cape and myrtle species important in the region's ecology,” she said.

Te Tairawhiti had a manuka industry based on myrtle species and the ramarama served as an important food calendar for birds.

Conservation Minister and East Coast MP Kiri Allan said the project would focus on monitoring myrtle rust infestation, mapping its spread and ramping up the propagation of plants that showed the most resistance to the disease.

As a community-led project the work would utilise “grounded knowledge” and implement biocultural monitoring approaches.

“Seed collection, storage and propagation protocols will also be co-developed alongside mana whenua, and capability developed to oversee the collection and propagation of native seeds for the East Coast region,” she said.

Ms Ngata said based on the demands of the project they would formulate research questions and identify the effective responses necessary to deal with the affected sites.

“We will be looking at ways we can respond to myrtle rust incursion and some of the things we can do,” she said.

For example, could seeds be collected from those affected areas, how to identify the areas and nursery where seeds have been collected and at what stage does a plant start to show symptoms of myrtle rust?

“We will be looking at all of these questions of myrtle rust, and how it behaves,” she said.

The research project would track the spread and infestation across a 27,800ha stretch of the East Coast coastline that had been identified as being critically vulnerable to myrtle rust infestation.

“We have three known critical sites that we will be looking at and then there are about seven randomised sites that we will be checking in on and collecting information from regularly,” Ms Ngata said.

Ms Allan said while the project would not prevent infections, it would help to understand the best methods to support susceptible myrtle species within the indigenous ecosystems.

The project would build capability in surveillance, monitoring, plant health and pathogen recognition, seed collecting and nursery management.

The information gained would be entered in a localised and national reporting system and will be used to guide management actions (such as seed banking for susceptible species) in the region and nationally through collaboration with DoC and Scion.

Ms Ngata said as a hapu they had been working on training programmes in the community since 2017 and wanted to extend that into a resource monitoring programme.

“We developed the project as a way of resourcing what we already been doing so that it could be consistent and well supported,” she said.

The project would also help in the creation of jobs for six people.

Ms Allan said it would be difficult to imagine a December without the red blaze of pōhutukawa.

“None of us want to see these plants disappear. All of us have a duty of care to do what we can, now,” she says.