Landcare Research New Zealand Limited Smart Ideas funded projects

Rivers and streams act as conveyor belts for sediment, causing a cascade of effects as fine sediment (sand, silt, and clay) is transported from terrestrial sources to coastal and oceanic receiving environments. Excess sediment negatively affects ecosystems, habitats, and cultural values, and limits land use for industry and infrastructure. Climate change is anticipated to accelerate erosion, increasing the production of sediment and exacerbating its impacts.

The National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management makes it compulsory for regional councils to manage deposited fine sediment, yet current monitoring protocols and datasets make it difficult to accurately identify state and trend, hampering effective management.

Our research will significantly enhance the resilience and productivity of Aotearoa using technological innovations to quantify the state and trend of fine sediment in aquatic environments, arming policymakers and kaitiaki with the knowledge they need to make effective decisions to safeguard water quality, nationally significant ecosystems, and economic and social well-being.

We will achieve this by fusing recent advances in optical and ranging sensor technology with leading data analytical methods, producing a transferable methodology to enable accurate quantification of deposited fine sediment cover and texture. These datasets will be harmonisable, informing science and policy from local to national scale. Longitudinal datasets will provide enhanced understanding of sediment dynamics, allowing regional councils, Māori organisations, and kaitiaki to better prioritise erosion and sediment controls, and optimise use of our natural capital to enhance economic and social well-being. We will work closely with end-users, who currently invest significant resources into environmental monitoring and management, and whose economic and social well-being are at risk from the impacts of climate change, to give them confidence in our new technology and the knowledge it unlocks.

Reducing erosion and improving freshwater quality while maintaining agricultural productivity are key challenges for environmental managers, policy-makers, and primary industry across NZ. To mitigate the adverse impacts of erosion and sediment we need new tools that improve the efficiency and effectiveness of targeting erosion control to areas contributing the most sediment, particularly at finer scale.

Sediment fingerprinting techniques use geochemical properties of soils and sediments to discriminate and apportion erosion source contribution to downstream sediments. However, this technique continues to be limited by its coarse spatial resolution and/or generic identification of sources. 

Our innovative project will develop the world’s first remote-sensing-based spatial sediment fingerprinting technology. We will integrate high-resolution spatial datasets with advanced geospatial modelling and point geochemistry to derive high-resolution geochemical characterisation of erosion sources for use in sediment fingerprinting. This integration will transform the resolution at which we can geochemically identify and trace the erosion sources of fine sediment from farm to catchment scales, thereby enabling more effective targeting of erosion control measures.

Our team combines world-leading expertise and skills in sediment fingerprinting, erosion process and geospatial modelling, data science, and machine learning. We will work with our stakeholders via existing relationships to ensure our project is at the forefront of international research and effectively disseminates new knowledge produced by the project.

This technology will benefit regional councils, landowners, and environmental managers, offering a sediment fingerprinting approach to enhance and more cost-effectively target erosion control. By mitigating the impacts of erosion and sediment on our landscapes, waterways and downstream receiving environments, our sensitive ecosystems will be preserved and our agricultural productivity maintained.

Landowners striving to adapt to climate change need advice tailored to their specific geography and production system. We propose that new generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) technology could help make information and advice accessible to landowners more quickly and cheaply than ever before. We aim to develop a GenAI platform for climate change adaptation, and conduct extensive research to ensure that this technology is ethical and meets the needs of farmers, councils, and Māori landowners.

This will be the first GenAI platform for climate adaptation developed anywhere in the world. All uses of AI require careful ethical consideration, particularly in relation to issues of Māori data governance and Te Tiriti o Waitangi principles. We will conduct an analysis of global and kaupapa Māori ethics to develop guidelines for adaptation GenAI that are ethically and socially responsible. We will conduct extensive surveys of potential end users to discover their needs and concerns, and test the platform with people working on the ground.

The platform that we develop will provide valuable information to help Aotearoa New Zealand adapt to climate change. The platform will support rural communities in understanding and responding to climate risks, and will help uncover new economic opportunities for farmers. Our research will pioneer the use of AI in environmental management globally, enable sustainable land management, and support kaitiakitanga.

Our past research has shown that bait-shy animals continue to feed cautiously on small amounts of non-toxic ‘pre-feed’ bait. Our Smart Idea is that adding neuropharmacologically active compounds to pre-feed can restore these shy pests’ drive to enter traps or consume toxic bait.

Vertebrate pest eradication programmes fail, in part, because control efforts usually generate some bait-shy and trap-shy survivors that are wary of subsequent control attempts. These animals quickly breed to restore the previous population. As a result, the Department of Conservation, regional councils and community conservation groups struggle to reduce populations of rats, possums and other pests on the New Zealand mainland. These groups are urgently seeking new tools to improve their pest control success.

For possums and ship rats we will use neuropharmacological methods to identify chemical compounds that provide a much greater stimulus to the reward circuitry of these animals’ brains than they experience from normal foods or traditional baits.

By combining these methods with our understanding of vertebrate pest behaviour, we will:

Determine the influence of a range of additives on dopamine release in the brain of possums and ship rats

measure the change in bait-seeking behaviour generated by that dopamine release.

We will use these steps to identify compounds that can be incorporated into baits to enhance the trappability of ship rats and possums.

By increasing target species’ drive to seek out and interact with traps and baits – thereby removing pests that were previously difficult to control – our approach will greatly improve the cost-effectiveness of many current pest control methods, including matauranga Maori techniques.