The Nelson/Tasman Branch AGM will be at 7.30 followed by the Guest speakers at 8 pm. There will be no pot luck meal beforehand.
Konstanze Steiner and Jonathan Puddick will speak about Our Lakes’ Health: Past, Present, Future. Konstanze and Jonathan are scientists at the Cawthron Institute, where they work on the Lakes380 project. This nation-wide project, aims to collect environmental, social and cultural information about Aotearoa-NZ’s lakes from the past and the present in order to protect the health of our lakes in the future. Using water and surface sediment samples we can understand what is currently happening in a lake, while lake sediment cores are used to investigate the past, capturing up to 1,000 years of water quality history. Innovative DNA-based techniques to detect and evaluate the abundance of freshwater taonga species such as the freshwater mussel kakahi are also being applied to these samples. Konstanze and Jonathan will provide an overview of the project, examples of how they use paleolimnological techniques to reveal how lakes have changed over the past 1,000 years and their work evaluating kakahi populations in lakes around Aotearoa-NZ.
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