Wildlife Fund helps Chch botanist to publish Mount Cook fieldguide

Press, 24 August 1976, Page 17

Wildlife Fund helps Chch botanist to publish Mount Cook fieldguide

By

JOHN WILSON

Where are the highest plants in New Zealand to be found and what are they? How have plants adapted to the rigorous conditions found on the flanks of New Zealand's highest mountains? What effects have the advance and retreat of glaciers and fires—natural and man-made—had on New Zealand’s mountain vegetation?

A Christchurch botanist, Hugh Wilson, has spent about four years scrambling — and often climbing — around the Mount Cook National Park finding the answers to these and dozens of other questions. Now, he has had the effort of those years of field-work, and of two more years working on his notes recognised by the National Parks Authority. Wilson’s work has been published by the authority as the first in a series presenting the results of major resource and scientific studies in the country’s national parks.

The publication is titled “Vegetation of Mount Cook National Park, New Zealand.” But this technical, scientific work has not been the only result of Hugh Wilson’s botanical survey of the Mount Cook Park. He was also responsible for most of the slide talks and nature walks given by rangers to Mount Cook visitors.

And he is eager to have published a less technical work which will help the ordinary visitor to Mount Cook and other parts of the Southern Alps to identify and observe the attractive and interesting mountain flora.

The only existing fieldguide to the plants of Mount Cook is Arnold Wall’s “The Flora of Mount Cook.” This book was published in 1925 and lias long been unobtainable. Besides, it is incomplete and now out-of-date as botanists have refined their knowledge and classifications of New Zealand’s alpine plants.

Since the beginning of this year Hugh Wilson has been working, on his own resources, on a popular fieldguide. He has been preparing detailed pencil sketches of a great number of the plants. With his savings running low, he applied to the national park authorities for financial assistance so that he could carry his project through to completion. He was disappointed not to receive further financial help from either the Mount Cook National Park Board or the National Parks Authority. Now, the World Wildlife

Fund (New Zealand) has to come to his aid with a grant which will allow him to continue to work on his drawings and text for another year. The fieldguide should be published in 1977.

The book will be this country’s first comprehensive guide to the alpine plants of a single area and the only pocket guide to New Zealand alpine plants. It will be of a compact, parka-pocket, size, about 250 pages long, with about 160 plates. Approximately 600 species of plants will be illustrated and described. The Wildlife Fund is to publish the fieldguide itself. It fears that a commercial publisher would want the book to appear in a larger format. This happened with “New Zealand Alpine Plants” by A. F. Mark and Nancy Adams, published in 1973,

which is a handsome book but quite impracticable, because of its size, as a fieldguide. The emphasis in Wilson’s book will be on the plants of Mount Cook, but Hugh and the officers of the Wildlife Fund both want to see its scope extended to plants found in the rest of the Southern Alps.

The Wildlife Fund was established in New Zealand as a charitable trust in 1975. It has branches in each major city. It raises money from individual and corporate donors to be spent particularly on

projects to save endangered species of animals.

The Fund tries to steer away from causes which are politically or socially contentious so that people can make donations to it without feeling their money is being spent on cause's with which they might not entirely agree.

The New Zealand branch was established with financial help from the world body, which is based in Switzerland. But New Zealand is expected to become a “donor” country, itself, helping to pay for conservation projects in lands less able to finance their own works. Since it was founded in 1961, the international fund has made grants of more than $2O million to almost 1500 projects in more than 80 countries. The panda is the organisat i o n ’ s internationallyknown symbol and its

“Save the Tiger” campaign was supported world-wide The fund hopes to raise a total of $50,000 to support conservation projects in New Zealand and overseas this year. New Zealand has set targets of $2OOO to protect the world’s remaining tropical rainforests, and $5OOO to help research and study in Fiji of the coral reefs of the South Pacific. But most of the money raised in New Zealand will be spent here. And the need is pressing. Of the more than 100 species of wildlife completely destroyed by man in the last 75 years, 15 have been New Zealand species. Another 27 New Zealand species are on the endangered list.

The Fund is supporting efforts to save the takahe with a grant of $BOOO. the kakapo with a grant of $2500, and the Chatham Islands robin with a grant of $2OOO. Two thousand dollars are going to aid research into the mangroves of northern New Zealand and another $2OOO to help the Tussock Grasslands Institute to investigate the effects of major engineering works, particularly in the upper Waitaki Valley, on wildlife habitats and populations. Providing support for Hugh Wilson’s fieldguide to the plants of Mount Cook is thus only a small part of what the Fund hopes to achieve this year, but the fieldguide will be the Wildlife Fund’s first main publishing project in New Zealand. The Fund hopes that its own work will become better known through its association with the project.