Environmental Monitoring and Research for Improved Resilience on Argos Farms

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Lincoln University Research Archive Environment Objective Rationale 1 of 136 ARGOS Working Paper No. 6. ENVIRONMENTAL MONITORING AND RESEARCH FOR IMPROVED RESILIENCE ON ARGOS FARMS Henrik Moller, Alex Wearing, Andrea Pearson, Chris Perley, David Steven, Grant Blackwell, Jeff Reid and Marion Johnson University of Otago, PO Box 56, Dunedin, New Zealand June 2005 Environment Objective Rationale EXECUTIVE SUMMARY This report outlines a rationale for proposed environmental monitoring on 136 farms participating in the Agriculture Research Group on Sustainability (ARGOS) project. A transdisciplinary research team of around 20 researchers, including sociologists, economists, farm management experts and ecologists will assess the sustainability and socio-ecological resilience of farms and orchards participating in organic, Integrated Management (IM), conventional farming systems and Mori farming systems. The farming sectors represented range from (i) high-input:high- output agriculture for dairy and kiwifruit production (mainly in North Island New Zealand), through (ii) medium-input:medium-output sheep and beef farming on the plains or rolling low hill country of South Island, to (iii) very low-input-low-output sheep/beef farming in the South Island High Country. A parallel study of Mori land use and sustainable development amongst Ngi Tahu Rnanga will include a variety of other farming approaches. A meta-analysis over all farm sectors and farming systems will attempt to identify key drivers of change and barriers to improved resilience. Researchers will monitor social, economic and environmental changes on farms over the next 20 to 30 years as part of an ‘independent assessor’ role, but they will also seek to help the participating farmers improve the sustainability and resilience of their enterprise by acting as ‘involved assistors’. This report identifies fundamental approaches and ecological processes to be researched mainly from an ecological point of view. Subsequent discussions amongst the whole ARGOS team are likely to adjust the priorities to get the maximum advantage from our expert sociological, economic, farm management and Mori colleagues. The fundamental stance of the research team is that a systems approach is needed to understand and help manage farming and farmscapes. This allows for transdisciplinarity, multiple scales, incorporates uncertainty, includes the farmer’s local knowledge and sees people as embedded within nature. Some of our specific research questions focus on understanding smaller parts of the problem, but the overall research project will be holistic in approach and application – otherwise we see no prospect of really helping farmers, their families and communities, their land or New Zealand. We prefer to guide the programme with ‘Resilience Theory’ rather than sustainability theory, because resilience shifts emphasis from study of ecosystem vulnerability to discovery of what makes socio-ecological systems strong enough to withstand perturbations by new threats. Rather than aiming for some mythical fixed goal of ‘sustainability’, which is defined very differently by different stakeholders, the goal is to aim for robust farming systems that can go with change or be taken in new directions by future generations of New Zealanders. The major opportunity for NZ biodiversity conservation in the new millennium is to extend conservation management to the two-thirds of its land area outside reserves, especially the production landscapes. Lowland landscapes are highly fragmented, but they are fertile and warm places where indigenous biota will flourish in greater variety and abundance than in upland national parks, provided they are appropriately managed in an integrated way with profitable and sustainable agriculture. There is every prospect that many threatened species, especially cryptic invertebrate taxa and rare plants can by nurtured on working farms. Ecological flows between reserves and production areas can either help or hinder national efforts to reverse the decline of indigenous biota. The aim of this research is to convert farmed landscapes from ‘sinks’ (areas where recruits from nursery areas can not survive long enough to replace themselves) into ‘sources’ (areas with viable populations that export excess offspring to surrounding areas). Current conservation research and management predominantly focuses on reserve areas, whereas for some species that effort may be undermined by unmanaged flows across reserves to the production part of the ecological matrix. The high level goal to reverse New Zealand’s declining biodiversity must therefore use complementary strategies for 2 Environment Objective Rationale stewardship of both ‘natural ecosystems’ and surrounding more modified landscapes. ARGOS seeks to water the biodiversity desert (production land) as the key means of supporting the vulnerable oases. A critical barrier to successful deployment of environmental restoration activities is the current barrier between multiple users of farmland and the actions of environmental scientists and environmental agencies. Our team wants to help farmers and kaitiaki assert their rightful place as stewards of the land and build their capacity to make a huge contribution to reducing the present decline of indigenous biota. ARGOS will also focus on defusing a damaging divide between some regulatory agencies and farmers by facilitating dialogue, sharing information and creating tools that build mutual respect and co-operation between land owners, regional councils and national institutions (MAF, DoC, MfE). Ecological processes and biodiversity on New Zealand’s farmed landscapes has received very little study so far because most environmental endeavour has been focused on threatened species and Protected Natural Areas. We can not effectively manage a system that we do not understand. Therefore we need to invest time and resources into studying general ecological processes in agro-ecosystems rather than simply monitoring the effects of different farming systems. We propose that 20% of resources are dedicated to researching ecological processes in years 1 and 2; 30% in years 3 and 4; and 40% in years 5 and 6. This allows the basic monitoring systems for sustainability and resilience indicators to be tested and perfected, before gradual escalation of research into understanding why the indicators are or are not changing. Identifying the reasons for the observed changes or lack of them is the key to better advice on how to bring the desired improvements in sustainability and resilience. The first step is to complete baseline ecological surveys on the ARGOS farms to learn what we have to work with. A baseline survey of landforms and habitats will be supplemented by biodiversity surveys of bats, birds, lizards, frogs, fish, insects, soil biota and plants in the first two years. These surveys will also test monitoring methods, so that by year three we can select a small group of ‘focal species’ for efficient long-term monitoring. These will be species judged to be particularly important to farming and ecological processes in farmscapes, for example species that provide ecosystem services (pollination, soil formation, predator biocontrol, seed dispersal), ones that are important pests, or ones that are especially loved and valued by the farmers or kaitiaki (‘flagship’ or ‘taonga’ species). We can not possibly measure all the biodiversity on farms so it is important that we choose focal species that are practical to measure, reasonably common and widespread, and particularly sensitive indicators to ecological practice. Naturally we will focus on species that are most likely to respond to conversion from conventional to IM and organic farming. A check for threatened species is very unlikely to find any, but if they are present, special monitoring and management will be put in place to support the farmers to find ways to nurture the populations without undue disruption to normal farming practice. We will invest 70% of our monitoring and research on supporting ‘agricultural biodiversity’, i.e. the plants, microbes, fungi and animals that have some direct role in affecting crops or livestock. The remainder will focus on general biodiversity on farms. Initial surveys of landforms and habitats will create maps of each participating farm and key features (shelterbelts, fences, houses, drains and streams etc.). These will provide baselines from which to monitor future changes. Remote sensing imagery will be ‘ground-truthed’ and then used to derive long-term indices of habitat complexity and diversity. A Geographic Information System (GIS) and database of all ecological descriptors will be generated to facilitate consistent long-term monitoring and analysis of environmental changes of farms by a research team that is itself likely to change. Lizards will be monitored using directed searches, pitfall traps of use of ‘Lizard Lounges’ (tiles and overlayed corrugated sheets which we provide for the lizards take cover in). Birds and bats 3 Environment Objective Rationale will be surveyed in spring and early summer when most species breed so we can better distinguish residents from seasonal visitors to farms. Small introduced mammalian predators (cats, ferrets, stoats, weasels, rats, mice, hedgehogs) will also be monitored because they potentially reduce the numbers of some native animals on farms, or even eliminate some altogether. If our feasibility

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