Systematics

Flora of New Zealand Volume 1, cover by Nancy Adams What do Star Trek, Sherlock Holmes, and the Flora of New Zealand have in common? Benedict Cumberbatch, who played “Khan” in Star …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

A specimen of Xanthorhoe bulbulata (Geometridae) from the NZAC. This moth is feared possibly extinct. (photo Birgit Rhode) The discovery of the tiny black-and-white micro-moth Eudarcia richardsoni in the Swiss Alps in …

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, …

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 …