Old man’s beard looking a bit sad (photo Jerry Cooper) Every year for the last 20 years I have gone to the annual FUNNZ fungal foray with colleagues and enthusiasts from around …
New Zealand is a hotspot for Carex (a type of sedge) with 116 species. This is not far short of our biggest plant group, the hebes (Veronica), with 125 species. The ancestor …
The King’s pouch fungus (photo Geoff Ridley) Back in 2012 I read about the half-life of facts. That is the period of time it takes for half the facts in a field …
The Pine That Built a Nation and the Tiny Worm that Could Sneak InIn New Zealand, Pinus radiata is much more than just another tree. It is the backbone of the country’s commercial …
50 years ago tomorrow, on 22 April 1970, a massive protest in USA against pollution and other destructive impacts of humanity heralded the first “Earth Day” and helped spawn the modern environmental …
A box of my ascomycete specimens (photo Peter Johnston) The life of a field systematist revolves around trips into the field to collect a wide variety of organisms, in my case ascomycete …
Co-author: Peter Buchanan This is the second instalment (first find here) in an exploration of the treasure chest that is New Zealand Fungarium Te Kohinga Hekaheka o Aotearoa (PDD), the national reference …
Hydora lanigera (photo Manaaki Whenua) We have few beetles in New Zealand that could be called truly aquatic but, what we do have includes the riffle beetles in the genus Hydora. With …