Systematics

How specimens were held in the past (photo Manaaki Whenua) For the past seven years, and more recently since October 2019, in a lesser-known part of the Allan Herbarium at Manaaki Whenua, …

Manaaki Whenua is the custodian of almost a third of Aotearoa New Zealand’s Nationally Significant Databases and Collections. These include biological resources such as reference species collections, and are important scientific, cultural …

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 …

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 …

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 …

It’s time to relax the strict guidelines around ecosourcing seed for local genetic stock if we want to build resilience into our changing environment. This call comes from MW researchers Peter Heenan, William …

Root plate in the Ōparara River basin dating to the 2013 cyclone that has Mittenia plumula plants (photo David Glenny) Goblins’ gold On looking into the interior of the cave, the background …

Peter Johnston and David Hera, Mangapapa Conservation area Autumn might be the cold rainy month everyone hates, but for a group of mycologists it’s their favourite time of the year. Autumn means …

We have recently scanned and added to our database many historic images of bacterial plant pathogen diseases. The ICMP culture collection is very useful as a store of living cryo-preserved fungal and …

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 …