The projects below show our monitoring work in practice, across settings as different as a near-two-decade estuary record, streams crossed by a new mountain highway, shellfish people gather to eat, life inside a city’s stormwater pipes, and the tarns of a subantarctic island 700 km offshore. Across all of them the task is the same: design monitoring that yields consistent, defensible data, and see it through from field surveys to analysis and reporting people can actually use. The real value though shows up over time: several of these records run for years or even decades, which lets them do what a one-off survey can’t – tell genuine change from natural variation, and even capture the ecological signature of the Canterbury earthquakes.
Te Ihutai/Avon-Heathcote Estuary Health
A multi-agency, nationally standardised monitoring programme that has tracked the ecological health of Ōtautahi/Christchurch’s estuary and tidal river mouths for close to two decades – a continuous record robust enough to have captured the ecological signature of the Canterbury earthquakes.
Te Ihutai / Avon-Heathcote Estuary is one of New Zealand’s largest urban estuaries – a tidal system on the edge of Ōtautahi/Christchurch that is both an important mahinga kai area and the receiving environment for the city’s two main rivers. In 2005, Christchurch City Council, Environment Canterbury and the Avon-Heathcote Estuary Ihutai Trust agreed a ‘Healthy Estuary & Rivers of the City’ programme to provide a road map for coordinated, multi-agency investment in long-term monitoring, and EOS Ecology was commissioned to design and implement the estuary and tidal river-mouth component. We built the survey methodology around recognised national estuary monitoring standards – jointly approved by CCC and Environment Canterbury – focusing on the indicators that matter most for estuarine health: sediment contamination, nutrient levels, macroalgae cover, and the infaunal and epifaunal invertebrate communities (including cockle abundance) that live in and on the estuary bed, sampled across up to seven sites in the estuary and the mouths of the Ōpāwaho/Heathcote and Ōtākaro/Avon rivers.
Since 2007, our science team has been the consistent provider of the annual field surveys and the laboratory invertebrate identification that underpin the programme, and the resulting data forms the basis of Environment Canterbury’s Healthy Estuary & Rivers of the City reporting. The real value of that consistency became clear after the 2010/11 Canterbury earthquakes: because we held a standardised, multi-site record reaching back years before the quakes, the dataset became a rare natural experiment for evaluating earthquake-driven change in an urban estuary – from physical shifts in the estuary bed (some sites rose by close to half a metre) through to changes in invertebrate community structure. Related shellfish monitoring – originally designed to track the closure of the estuary’s wastewater discharge and the move to an ocean outfall – was similarly well placed to capture the ecological effects of the unprecedented discharge of untreated wastewater into the estuary after the earthquakes, and those findings have since been presented at science conferences and in public-facing outputs.
In 2022 we worked with Environment Canterbury to review and refresh the programme so it would sit more closely alongside the council’s monitoring in other Canterbury estuaries; the review confirmed the robustness of the original 2005 design, with only minor updates needed, which we implemented from 2023. That same year we also supported the Avon-Heathcote Estuary Ihutai Trust to establish its first community-based cockle population monitoring across the estuary’s intertidal and subtidal habitats, analysing and reporting on the results. Nearly two decades on, the programme’s strength is its continuity: a single, defensible, methodologically consistent dataset that turns annual monitoring into genuine trend detection, gives CCC and Environment Canterbury a sound basis for decisions about a complex and changing estuary, and demonstrates the kind of long-term monitoring stewardship – design, field delivery, laboratory processing, analysis and reporting under one roof – that the same approach can bring to estuarine and coastal systems anywhere.
Tararua Dairy Farms Stream Health
Biological monitoring that gave a farmer-led water quality programme a defensible, regionally comparable measure of stream health, paired with the science communication outputs that put the results directly into farmers’ hands.
DairyNZ’s Tararua Plantain Project is a seven-year initiative, running since 2018–19 with Horizons Regional Council, Massey University and agronomists, testing whether New Zealand-bred plantain cultivars can reduce the soil nitrate that leaches from beneath cows’ urine patches – with early research suggesting reductions in soil nitrogen of roughly 5–30%, depending on soil type and how much plantain is in the cows’ diet. At the heart of the project is a farmer-led, monthly water quality monitoring programme spread across more than 20 dairy-farm waterway sites in the upper Manawatū River catchment, around Dannevirke, Woodville, Pahiatua and Eketahuna. EOS Ecology was engaged to add a biological dimension to that effort and to help bring the results home to the farmers taking part.
Our science team designed a macroinvertebrate biomonitoring programme deliberately aligned to Horizons Regional Council’s state-of-the-environment monitoring methodology, so that the project’s data would sit directly alongside the council’s long-term regional sites rather than standing in isolation. We sampled the stream invertebrate communities and habitat at the project sites over three years, then processed and analysed the samples to derive each site’s Macroinvertebrate Community Index (MCI) – a well-established, integrative measure of stream health that reflects the balance of pollution-sensitive groups such as mayflies, stoneflies and caddisflies against more tolerant worms and snails. Because macroinvertebrates respond to the cumulative condition of a waterway rather than a single moment’s water chemistry, MCI gave the project a robust, holistic indicator against which the benefits of the plantain trial could be tracked over time.
Rigorous data only changes behaviour if the people on the land can make sense of it, so our scientists worked alongside our science interpreters to turn the results into something farmers could use. Each participating landowner received an individual report card carrying their site’s MCI score, a plain-English explanation of what it means, and photographs of the three most abundant macroinvertebrate taxa found at their site. We also produced a large 1.8 m × 1.2 m wall-map infographic showing MCI scores across all of the project sites together with Horizons Regional Council’s monitoring sites, which DairyNZ used at Tararua Plantain Project open days – letting farmers see at a glance how their own stream health compared with others across the region, and where the project’s potential and observed benefits were showing up. It is a compact illustration of the EOS Ecology approach: defensible field science and laboratory analysis carried right through to interpretation and design, so the evidence lands with the audience that needs to act on it.
Te Ahu a Turanga: Manawatū Tararua Highway
Designing and delivering the sediment-focused, pre-construction freshwater baseline for the major new highway replacing the closed Manawatū Gorge route – the reference dataset against which the build’s effects on Manawatū River tributaries can be measured.
When the Manawatū Gorge section of State Highway 3 closed for good, Waka Kotahi NZ Transport Agency set about building Te Ahu a Turanga: Manawatū Tararua Highway – an 11.5 km replacement route that climbs through steep country in the Ruahine Range and crosses the headwaters of several small Manawatū River tributaries. Major earthworks in terrain like that carry a real risk of mobilising fine sediment into those streams, so, following early discussions with Horizons Regional Council, NZTA commissioned EOS Ecology to design and run a sediment-focused baseline freshwater monitoring programme – a clear, defensible picture of stream condition before construction began, against which the effects of the build could later be measured.
We built the programme from the ground up, selecting 19 monitoring sites across six subcatchments through an ecological value-and-risk ranking so that effort was concentrated where it mattered most. From December 2018 we tracked the sediment-related measures that matter for these streams – visual water clarity, total suspended solids, turbidity, and deposited fine sediment cover – across repeated dry- and wet-weather rounds, sampled macroinvertebrate communities across the seasons, and later added aluminium and pH in anticipation of the aluminium-based flocculants likely to be used in construction sediment-detention ponds. The catchments told distinctly different stories, mostly tracking land use: the most degraded stream was unfenced agricultural country with stock access and active bank erosion, while the healthiest was a forested gully protected within a QEII covenant. That contrast carried a clear management message – construction trigger values should be derived from each catchment’s own baseline rather than from off-the-shelf national guidelines.
Midway through the baseline work, and under tight timeframes, we also produced a freshwater ecology assessment of environmental effects for the early enabling works – the access-track upgrades and stream crossings needed before the main build could start. That assessment confirmed native fish in the affected streams, including the At Risk – Declining longfin eel alongside shortfin eel, bullies and kōura, and concluded that the effects of the six crossings would be no more than minor provided the right mitigation was in place – fish rescue and relocation, dry worksites, robust erosion and sediment control, and ‘stream-simulation’ culverts designed to keep fish passage open. Throughout the fieldwork, iwi representatives joined our sampling trips to get to know the affected waterways and the field techniques involved. The lasting value is the baseline itself: it fed directly into the resource-consent process, and the construction-phase monitoring continues to use many of the sites we established – exactly the role a well-designed baseline is meant to play.
Masterton Town Water Abstraction
An ecological impact assessment built on more than a decade of long-term monitoring data and modern eDNA, demonstrating that over a century of town-water abstraction has left the Waingawa River in high ecological condition.
Masterton has drawn its town water from the Waingawa River for well over a century – first by capturing spring flows near the riverbanks from around 1900, and since 1982 through a siphon intake on the upper river that feeds the city’s water treatment plant. When Masterton District Council applied to Greater Wellington to renew its consent to take and divert that water, the regional council issued a formal information request for a freshwater ecological impact assessment, to be prepared in line with the national EIANZ guidelines and to consider not just the immediate intake but the ecological values of the river as a whole, the fish species present (including any threatened natives), and how the operation might affect them. EOS Ecology was engaged to carry out that independent assessment.
Rather than rest on a single snapshot survey, we built the description of the existing environment from the deep well of monitoring data already held for the Waingawa – Greater Wellington’s long-term State-of-the-Environment record at the nearby South Road site, New Zealand Freshwater Fish Database records (including Fish & Game’s regular drift-dive counts), previous ecological surveys at the water treatment plant, and publicly available eDNA data – and supplemented it with a new four-site eDNA survey along the river in February 2024. Together these showed a river in genuinely good health: high water quality, large stony substrates with little fine sediment, a macroinvertebrate community indicative of very good to excellent conditions, and a diverse fish fauna of fifteen species, among them one Threatened – Nationally Vulnerable species and six classed as At Risk – Declining. Using the EIANZ value-and-magnitude framework, we assessed the Waingawa as being of high ecological value.
Against that high-value backdrop we assessed three potential effects of the take and treatment-plant operation: fauna entering the siphon intake, fish passage past a boulder structure built across the channel to aid the siphon, and the downstream effects of reduced flow. A site visit confirmed the boulder structure was not a barrier to fish passage, the abstraction has long operated under a minimum-flow regime that protects instream values, and Masterton District Council is committed to a new, larger storage-pond design incorporating an integrated fish screen so fish can no longer be drawn into the plant. With the river of high ecological value but the magnitude of each effect assessed as negligible, the overall level of effect was very low – ‘less than minor’ in resource-management terms. The case rested on something monitoring data is uniquely able to provide: evidence that more than a hundred years of town-water abstraction has left the Waingawa’s freshwater ecology essentially intact.
Westland District Council Landfills
Reviewing, redesigning and then delivering the long-term surface water and groundwater monitoring at two closed West Coast landfills – a programme robust enough to tell landfill leachate apart from other sources, and repeatable enough to run reliably year after year.
Closed landfills don’t stop needing attention the day they shut – their resource consents require long-term monitoring of the surrounding surface water and groundwater to confirm that buried waste isn’t leaching contaminants into nearby waterways. Westland District Council holds two such closed sites on the West Coast, at Hokitika and Kumara, each with its own consent and its own schedule of water quality conditions to meet. In 2019 the Council asked EOS Ecology to review the existing monitoring programmes, which had become difficult to run reliably, and to put them on a sounder footing. Working closely with the Council, we audited every sampling site specified in the consents against what was actually achievable in the field – and found a recurring problem.
Several of the consent-specified sites were ephemeral – frequently dry or barely flowing – which made them unsuitable for consistent water quality sampling; others sat downstream of more than just the landfill. At Hokitika, for instance, the most downstream consent site also picked up runoff from a neighbouring fertiliser store and a roadside drain, so a high reading there couldn’t safely be pinned on the landfill. We relocated the unworkable sites to nearby points that reliably hold water, and added new monitoring locations above and below those other potential sources, so that any contaminant detected could be attributed to its correct origin rather than wrongly blamed on, or excused for, the landfill. Just as importantly, we documented each site’s location, access route and method in detail, so the programme would be repeatable and straightforward to pick up in future rounds.
Since that redesign, our science team has carried out the surface water and groundwater sampling each year and prepared the annual compliance reports the consents require – visually assessing each site, collecting surface water, leachate and groundwater-bore samples, and testing them through an independent laboratory against the consent conditions and the Australian and New Zealand (ANZG 2018) freshwater guideline values. Each report sets out clearly where conditions were met and where they were breached, what the likely source is, and what follow-up the consent then triggers, while also flagging the practical realities of the work – overgrown access, dry bores, sites needing permanent markers – so the programme keeps improving. The result is exactly what long-term compliance monitoring should be: defensible, repeatable, and clear enough to keep the Council on top of its obligations and to support sound decisions about its closed landfills.
Food Safety of Wild Kai
Long-term monitoring that answers a question the community genuinely asks – is it safe to eat the fish and shellfish gathered from our estuary and rivers? Testing wild-harvested mahinga kai against national food-safety standards and reporting the answer back to the public.
People have long gathered fish and shellfish from Te Ihutai/Avon-Heathcote Estuary and the rivers that feed it – but in a city environment, is that wild kai actually safe to eat? Since 2008, Environment Canterbury has commissioned EOS Ecology to help answer that question, testing the levels of contaminants in the fish and shellfish that people are most likely to harvest from the estuary and the lower Ōtākaro/Avon and Ōpāwaho/Heathcote rivers. What began as a heavy-metals survey repeated every two years has matured into a broader food-safety programme, now run on a five-yearly cycle (most recently in 2025), with the results published as public Environment Canterbury reports.
The monitoring spans the species that matter most to gatherers: estuary shellfish such as cockles and pipi (and tuatua along the coast), estuary fish including yellow-eyed mullet and flounder, and shortfin eel from the rivers. Collecting them calls for a mix of boat- and land-based techniques – hand-gathering shellfish at low tide, fyke-netting eels overnight, and netting or line-fishing for estuary fish – all undertaken under a Ministry for Primary Industries special permit. Samples are measured, then processed and tested by an independent laboratory for a suite of contaminants: heavy metals such as cadmium, lead and arsenic, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), and – added as the programme grew – the faecal-indicator bacterium E. coli and enteric viruses such as norovirus. Results are assessed against the Australia and New Zealand Food Standards Code and the relevant Ministry for Primary Industries shellfish requirements, so the findings can be expressed in the terms that actually govern food safety.
The picture that emerges is nuanced, and that nuance is the point. In recent surveys the heavy metals and PCBs in fish and shellfish sat at safe levels for eating, but E. coli in estuary shellfish was widely variable and, at some sites, exceeded food-safety limits – a reminder that gathered shellfish can be unsafe at certain places and times, particularly after sewage overflows or heavy rain. EOS Ecology pairs this rigorous sampling and analysis with the science interpretation that makes it useful: engaging, plain-language reports that explain where contaminants come from, what the results mean, and whether the kai is safe to eat, which Environment Canterbury then shares with the wider community. It is monitoring with a direct public-good purpose – turning careful contaminant data into clear guidance that helps people make safe decisions about the food they gather.
Wastewater Discharge Shellfish Monitoring
Using shellfish as living indicators of human-sewage contamination to test whether moving Christchurch’s wastewater to an ocean outfall improved shellfish safety – one of New Zealand’s few long-term shellfish-pathogen datasets, and a direct line to public-health warnings.
For years, Christchurch discharged its treated wastewater into the Avon-Heathcote Estuary/Ihutai, before that discharge was decommissioned and moved to an ocean outfall several kilometres offshore. To find out whether that change actually improved the safety of shellfish in the estuary, Christchurch City Council commissioned EOS Ecology to monitor pathogen levels in shellfish – using cockles and tuatua as living indicators of human-sewage contamination. The work tested for the faecal-indicator bacterium E. coli, for Salmonella, and for norovirus, a human-origin virus whose presence is an unambiguous fingerprint of human sewage.
We built the estuary programme around a before-after control-impact (BACI) design – quarterly monitoring for two years before and after the ocean outfall was commissioned in March 2010, with a control site in the neighbouring Saltwater Creek Estuary – making it one of the very few long-term programmes anywhere to track the removal of a treated-wastewater discharge from an estuary. The Canterbury earthquakes of 2010 and 2011 then intervened: prolonged raw-sewage overflows pushed viral and bacterial levels in the shellfish to unprecedented highs, and the monitoring was extended so the recovery could be followed and the earthquake signal separated from the genuine post-outfall picture. The results were telling – estuary cockles were almost always carrying norovirus, with sharp spikes tied to those sewage overflows, clear evidence that the estuary was still receiving human sewage from time to time. Alongside this, we monitored tuatua along the city’s coastline annually from 2007 to 2021 to track the performance of the ocean outfall discharge itself.
This was monitoring with an immediate public-safety purpose: whenever the testing found high pathogen levels in the shellfish, the warning signs advising people not to gather kai went up – a neat synergy of science and signage that kept people safer. Over more than a decade it also built something rarer: one of New Zealand’s few long-term datasets on shellfish pathogen levels, and a robust BACI record of what happens when a wastewater discharge is removed from an estuary – work of national and international relevance. It left EOS Ecology with deep, transferable experience in how stormwater and sewage discharges affect the food safety of shellfish, and in using shellfish themselves as sensitive, defensible indicators of contamination in coastal and estuarine waters.
Īnanga Spawning Habitat Surveys
Standardised, repeatable surveys of where whitebait spawn, and how good that habitat is, across Christchurch’s rivers, lakes and Banks Peninsula streams, giving the city the evidence to protect and enhance a declining mahinga kai species.
Īnanga – the most common and widespread of New Zealand’s five whitebait species – spawn in a very particular place: among dense riparian vegetation at the upper edge of the saltwater–freshwater interface, where eggs laid around the spring-high-tide line then develop out of the water until the next big tide. That makes their spawning habitat both highly specific and easily lost to mowing, stock, bank erosion or the wrong vegetation, and it leaves īnanga, a declining mahinga kai species, vulnerable. Christchurch City Council engages EOS Ecology to monitor that habitat across the city’s waterways – both assessing how suitable the potential spawning habitat is, and surveying where spawning is actually happening.
We run two complementary strands, both built on standardised, repeatable methods so the results hold up over time and sit alongside work done elsewhere in the country. Habitat is scored using the National Īnanga Spawning Programme’s system, which rates twelve attributes – from fish and saltwater access and bank angle through to vegetation cover, root-mat thickness, ground moisture and bank maintenance – into an overall Good, OK or Bad rating for each reach of bank. Spawning surveys then follow established census methods: systematic egg searches through the riparian vegetation around the spring-high-tide line, with egg patches mapped and measured and their productivity calculated. Using the national protocol means each year’s findings can be compared directly with the last, and with the longer record built up by earlier University of Canterbury research in these same catchments.
Over successive years the programme has worked through Christchurch’s main īnanga catchments and beyond – Banks Peninsula streams at Pigeon Bay and Okains Bay, the Ōtākaro/Avon River catchment and its associated lakes and tributaries, and the Ōpāwaho/Heathcote catchment and Linwood Canal – building a picture of where good habitat lies, where spawning is concentrated, and how that shifts from year to year. The surveys repeatedly show that the detail matters: even reaches scored as poor habitat can still hold eggs, so the whole spawning zone is worth checking rather than just the obvious sites. Most importantly, the monitoring feeds straight back into management – pinpointing where the council should hold off mowing during the spawning season, where riparian planting or gentler bank angles would extend good habitat, and how modifying tide gates and barriers would improve fish and saltwater access. It is monitoring designed not just to record the state of a threatened species, but to tell the people who maintain these waterways exactly where and how to help it.
Post-Earthquake Aquatic Investigations
When the Canterbury earthquakes flooded Christchurch’s rivers with liquefaction silt and raw sewage, EOS Ecology’s deep local knowledge and pre-quake datasets made it part of the multi-agency response, rapidly assessing the damage, separating earthquake effects from background change, and guiding how the city repaired its waterways.
The 2010–2011 Canterbury earthquakes did more than damage buildings; they reshaped Christchurch’s waterways, driving liquefaction sand and silt, slumping banks, uplifted streambeds, and raw sewage from shattered pipes into the city’s rivers and streams. EOS Ecology’s deep knowledge of those waterways – and the years of pre-earthquake survey data it already held – led to its inclusion in the Earthquake Environmental Response Team alongside Christchurch City Council, Environment Canterbury and NIWA. With existing baseline data in hand, we were able to do something rare after a natural disaster: assess what the earthquakes had actually done to the rivers’ fish and invertebrate communities by comparing directly against how they had been before.
Because the damage varied so much from place to place, and because some reaches had no recent baseline at all, we designed several complementary studies rather than relying on a single survey. Where pre-earthquake data existed in the upper, wadeable waterways, we ran before-and-after comparisons of fish and invertebrate communities; in the lower, non-wadeable Avon and Heathcote – where no baseline was available – we devised an in-situ bioassay, caging sensitive invertebrates upstream and downstream of sewage discharges and tracking their survival, and monitored dissolved oxygen. The overall picture was one of resilience: there was no mass loss of species, and the city’s hardy, pollution-tolerant urban faunas largely persisted. But the localised effects were real – reduced fish abundance and fewer pollution-sensitive caddisflies and declining bluegill bully at central-city sites, and reduced survival of sensitive invertebrates downstream of continuing sewage, driven by low dissolved oxygen and elevated ammonia.
We also turned the science to immediate practical use, mapping the biodiversity hotspots in Christchurch’s waterways so that the enormous programme of earthquake repair and sediment-removal works in and along the rivers could be managed to avoid the most ecologically valuable places. Around ten months after the February 2011 quake, we surveyed the lower Avon’s fish and invertebrates – the first such survey of that non-wadeable reach in over two decades – and recommended it become the template for long-term monitoring of the non-wadeable portions of all four main Christchurch rivers. Given the strong public interest, the findings were written up not just as technical reports but as clear, visually engaging public summaries. It is a demonstration of what long-term ecological knowledge makes possible: the ability to respond fast and rigorously when it matters most, and to leave behind both a defensible record and the tools to keep watching.
Wellington’s Piped Streams Ecology
A first-of-its-kind investigation into the freshwater life inside Wellington’s underground stormwater pipes – developing novel confined-space survey methods to establish that piped streams are living habitat and active fish-migration corridors, not just conveyance.
In hilly, heavily developed Wellington, most of the city’s small streams have been progressively buried in pipes to make way for development and to manage flood and disease risk – in some catchments more than 90% of the natural channel length is now underground, leaving only fragmented open remnants. Ecological information had only ever been gathered from those visible open sections, while the piped reaches connecting them were managed purely as stormwater infrastructure and their ecology was essentially unknown. Building on earlier integrated catchment work on Wellington’s open streams, Greater Wellington Regional Council and Wellington City Council commissioned EOS Ecology to answer a simple but unexplored question: what actually lives in the pipes beneath the streets, and do these hidden waterways have ecological value beyond moving water?
Answering it meant developing field methods for an environment few ecologists had ever sampled. Using Wellington Water Limited’s stormwater and manhole GIS layers we identified candidate access points, then lifted manhole lids across three urban catchments – Pae Kawakawa Stream (Island Bay), Miramar Stream (Miramar) and Waipapa Stream (Hataitai) – gas-testing the air and characterising habitat before any entry. Because the pipes are confined spaces, the fieldwork was carried out under specialist confined-space safety procedures, and we adapted and combined a suite of techniques to suit: long-handled kick-net and in-pipe Surber sampling for macroinvertebrates, trail cameras positioned at manhole entrances together with spotlighting and netting for fish, and sticky traps for flying insects. Six sites were surveyed in detail across two field rounds in 2019, with the results set out in an interim study and then a comprehensive final report.
The pipes turned out to be far from lifeless. Fish were present at five of the six sites – both longfin and shortfin tuna/eels, alongside banded kōkopu and īnanga – confirming that migratory native fish are not simply passing through but using the pipe network as habitat and as a migration corridor between the sea and isolated open-channel remnants, with a clear pattern of eels dominating the pipes while banded kōkopu and kōura hold the open reaches. In-pipe sampling recorded 31 macroinvertebrate taxa, and even spider webs and the flying insects caught on sticky traps pointed to a resident community living in near-total darkness. The study established the first defensible baseline for these forgotten ecosystems and a tested set of methods to monitor them – and made a practical case for treating piped streams as more than stormwater conveyance, from recognising them in regional planning through to retrofitting pools, baffles and fish cover to improve habitat. The work drew national media attention and reframed how urban piped waterways can be valued and managed.
Campbell Island Bicentennial Expedition
Coordinating the largest multidisciplinary research expedition to remote, subantarctic Campbell Island in more than 30 years, and leading the first comprehensive survey of its streams and tarns, which more than tripled the island’s known freshwater fauna and set a baseline for its long-term conservation.
Campbell Island / Motu Ihupuku lies some 700 kilometres south of the New Zealand mainland, deep in the Southern Ocean – a World Heritage subantarctic island whose freshwater streams and tarns were among the least-studied aquatic environments in the country. In the summer of 2010–2011, EOS Ecology developed and coordinated the Campbell Island Bicentennial Expedition, the largest multidisciplinary research expedition to the island in more than 30 years. Run under the Fifty Degrees South Trust and supported logistically by the Royal New Zealand Navy and the Department of Conservation, the 14-person, 11-week expedition brought together specialists in botany, freshwater ecology, terrestrial invertebrates and human history – and pulling that off in such a remote, demanding environment was itself a considerable feat of planning, logistics and inter-agency coordination.
Alongside coordinating the expedition, EOS Ecology led its freshwater ecology team and carried out the first comprehensive survey of the island’s waterbodies – more than 25 waterway sites and 35 tarns. The fieldwork combined habitat assessment with extensive sampling of aquatic invertebrates, periphyton and microbes, water and sediment quality, sediment cores, and specimens for eDNA and stable-isotope analysis. The processing and taxonomic work that followed back on the mainland transformed what was known about the island: its documented freshwater fauna rose from just 13 taxa to more than 50, including species new to science and the first taxonomic treatment of a remarkably diverse freshwater oligochaete (worm) fauna – the greatest such diversity recorded from any subantarctic island. The work produced the first online interactive identification keys to the island’s freshwater invertebrates, an invertebrate reference collection now housed at the national museum Te Papa, and peer-reviewed publications that even reconstructed the island’s past climate from diatoms preserved in sediment cores; one newly discovered species was named after EOS Ecology.
Because so few people will ever set foot on Campbell Island, EOS Ecology also designed and ran the expedition’s public-engagement programme, sending blogs, social-media updates and live radio and television interviews back to the mainland by satellite – real-time glimpses of life and science on a subantarctic island. The lasting value, though, is the baseline. Where previously very little was understood about the ecology of the island’s streams and tarns, the expedition established a defensible baseline dataset and the identification tools to use it – directly supporting the Department of Conservation’s long-term management of the island and its goals under the New Zealand Biodiversity Strategy, while the freshwater oligochaete discoveries continue to inform the global puzzle of how life colonises isolated oceanic islands. It is the kind of foundational survey work that turns a remote unknown into something that can be monitored, managed and protected for generations.