Systematics

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 …

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 …

Display items from the PDD treasure chest (photo Manaaki Whenua). Did you know that we have our own national collection of fungi? The New Zealand Fungarium Te Kohinga Hekaheka o Aotearoa (PDD) …

Scanning electron microscope photographs of Meloidogyne minor. Female

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

When I first started out learning about the flora of Aotearoa New Zealand I bought three books, volume one and two of the “Flora of New Zealand” and the first edition of …