Many donor organizations and others working in Pacific Island Countries for climate-change adaptation underestimate the importance of understanding both how Pacific Island peoples conceptualize Nature and their attitudes towards efforts to impact the ways it changes. In many cases, such understanding is an essential preliminary for effective and sustained interventions in support of climate-change adaptation in Pacific communities. Through a survey of Pacific Island tertiary students, this poster explains how spiritual beliefs affect attitudes towards Nature as well as responses to climate-driven environmental changes in the region.

Pacific island countries are already feeling the effects of climate change and these are almost certain to be amplified in the future. Today’s adolescents (14-18 year olds) will become some of the principal architects of future responses to mid-century climate change in the region. They therefore need to be equipped with a realistic understanding of the probable impacts of climate change and its various effects on their countries. To measure climate-change understanding and the degree to which adolescents relate this to their local/national environment, focus groups were held in several Fiji schools and communities. Results reveal a sound formal understanding of the context, reflecting the high-school curriculum, but little in-depth understanding and a common distancing of the issue. Many adolescents bemoaned their inability to have their voices heard in their communities, faith groups and often families. Adolescents felt that adults (and decision-makers) lacked sufficient understanding of climate change and undervalued the importance of anticipatory actions.

This exploratory case study examines nature-culture community from a New Zealand Māori perspective, with an emphasis on Whale Watch Kaikoura. The study highlights the importance of Māori beliefs nature and environment coupled with the underpinning values of the culture. Further to this is the cultural importance of this venture for the local Kaikoura Māori community and the effect this has had on this township. Thus the benefits of this organisation for the local Māori community of Kaikoura will be analysed to establish whether this is something that could be modelled in different settings throughout New Zealand or not. The long term sustainability of the operation will also be analysed through documentation and interview with the Chief Operation Officer to establish the future direction of this venture. With the recent devastating earthquake in Kaikoura and the effect of this, findings will also support the ongoing work and commitment required to rebuild and establish Kaikoura as a key community in New Zealand. The cascading effect of such a natural disaster will be included as part of the analysis in this nature-culture research case study.

Whale Watch Kaikoura, Māori, nature-culture, community

This research project focus is around Chinese international students who have come to New Zealand to study and live. The purpose of the study is research the mobility of these students while living in New Zealand including visitor choices and options. What is clear is that the Chinese students do prefer to travel with groups of friends when living in New Zealand. They also visit local tourist attractions in the city they are based in and enjoy traveling over the summer holidays. They enjoy the freedom of using a private vehicle rather than a rental car and travel independently and not in organized tours. These students enjoy a range of activities but prefer looking, rather than participating, with nature-based activities. Although they speak English well enough to study here, they commented that guidelines and information in the Chinese language would be helpful. The acculturation of Chinese international students into New Zealand includes independent travel and choices. This is something which is often quite unique for many Chinese students who have come from a culture which is more bound by family traditions and customs.

Different vegetation functional types respond at different speeds to rainfall, with some plants rapidly increasing productivity and greening while others have a slower response. A particular community of ephemeral vegetation in Western Queensland, Australia, has been identified as important habitat component for a little known and endangered species, the Night Parrot (Pezoporus occidentalis). The patches of ephemeral-dominated vegetation associated with the parrot vary at the scale of metres, however these higher productivity patches are too small or dynamic to be mapped by existing categorisations. We develop a new method to understand the response to rainfall by small patches of ephemeral vegetation, based on field measurements of fractional cover, phenocam data and remote sensing. The ground measurements will be used with the Auscover fractional cover timeseries data in order to develop a classification scheme that can be applied more broadly. Effectively mapping patches of high productivity within vegetation communities will directly support the conservation effort for the Night Parrot, while also improving understanding of the distribution and temporal dynamics of these systems at fine spatial and temporal scales.

Cross-property collaboration has the potential to enhance the viability of environmental actions and enterprise options extending beyond individual property boundaries. Environmental issues such as habitat connectivity, riparian management, soil erosion and weed and pest control could benefit from increased collaboration, while collaborative commercial activities could potentially include ecotourism, agroforestry, biobanking, carbon farming and kangaroo management.
Recent developments around online spatial tools offer enhanced opportunities for collaboration by enabling landholders to connect with one another, to identify landscape-scale opportunities for environmental or commercial collaboration, and to act as a repository of user-generated spatial data including monitoring results and case studies. This paper reports on the work of a two-year multi-stakeholder Landholder Collaboration project in the Central Tablelands of NSW that is now entering its final phase, focussing on spatial analysis and the development of a GIS-based online tool to be pilot-tested with landholder groups. . Social research with these groups identified a lack of reliable internet access as a major barrier for access and adoption of online instruments for many landholders, and data security as a key priority. Leading issues identified for inclusion in the pilot-testing of the tool in 2017 include weed and pest management, landscape-scale revegetation corridors and ecotourism.

Global warming has unequally affected different regions and arid or semi-arid areas may be particularly sensitive to temperature rising. Therefore it is critical to understand the environmental change in these area where freshwater resource and biodiversity conservation are highly related to both landscape change and climate variability. Previous studies suggest that palaeolimnological proxies can be powerful tools to provide insight of these issues. Here we present the result of the subfossil chironomid analyses from the surface sediment of over 100 lakes from Northern China and central Mongolia. Most of the lakes in this region are saline due to effects of the past environmental changes. Some of the lakes from Northeast China are also eutrophied. Primary results indicate that the diversity of the chinronomid species from these lakes is low however, they show great potentials to tracking both the climate-related changes and human impact in this vast region.

Suitable measures of grazing impacts on ground cover, that enable separation of the effects of climatic variations, are needed to inform land managers and policy makers across the arid rangelands of the Northern Territory of Australia. This work developed and tested a time-series, change-point detection method for application to time series of vegetation fractional cover derived from Landsat data to identify irregular and episodic ground-cover growth cycles. These cycles were classified to distinguish grazing impacts from that of climate variability. A measure of grazing impact was developed using a multivariate technique to quantify the rate and degree of ground cover change. The method was successful in detecting both long term (> 3 years) and short term (< 3 years) growth cycles. Growth cycle detection was assessed against rainfall surplus measures indicating a relationship with high rainfall periods. Ground cover change associated with grazing impacts was also assessed against field measurements of ground cover indicating a relationship between both field and remotely sensed ground cover. Cause and effects between grazing practices and ground cover resilience can now be explored in isolation to climatic drivers. Important to the long term balance between ground cover utilisation and overall landscape function and resilience.