Student Volunteer Week, 1-7 April 2019, celebrates and recognises the contributions of young people taking their future into their own hands. 
 
The focus in 2019 is Kaitiakitanga, the guardianship of our environment. Student volunteers are instrumental to this guardianship and are at the forefront of advocating for environmental protection and carbon neutrality. 

In te reo Māori, macrons are known as tohutō: tohu meaning a sign or a symbol, tō meaning to pull or heave: they are symbols that stretch.

Tohutō are essential in written reo Māori because their addition or omission can either change or remove meaning from a word. Despite this, tohutō are frequently omitted from text in newspapers, on road-signs and everything in between. Sometimes, the change in meaning can have disastrous results!

New Zealand’s southernmost school is a shining example of the active role of education in conservation efforts. With a mere 32 students, Halfmoon Bay School (Oban - Rakiura/Stewart Island) certainly punches above its weight.

On the 24th of November, 65 biology teachers from the Wellington region gathered at ZEALANDIA for the Biology Educators Association of New Zealand (BEANZ) Workshop. The event provided a forum for teachers to build connections, share resources and insights, discuss the direction of the curriculum and hear from educators and scientists working in and around ZEALANDIA.

Aged 13, George Hobson is one of ZEALANDIA’s youth ambassadors – a team of around ten young people who help with the work of the Education Team. George’s enthusiasm and dedication recently won him ZEALANDIA’s Tītipounamu Award for Future Leaders.

Matariki, the start of the Māori New Year, is signalled by the appearance of seven stars low on the north-eastern horizon at dawn. Also known as Pleiades, the stars arrive any time from late May to mid June. This year the stars arrived on 18 June. Different tribes celebrated Matariki at different times. In the 21st century, the New Year starts with the first new moon following the rising of Matariki.

Swamps, marshes, fens and bogs.  These are our wetland areas, crucial buffer zones at the boundaries between land and water. Wetlands act as giant sponges in the landscape, soaking up rainfall which helps prevent flooding during storms. They also help protect rivers and lakes from runoff from the land during heavy rain by trapping sediment that can choke a stream and absorbing surplus nutrients like nitrogen that can lead to the explosion of algal blooms.  Wetlands are a toxin sink, storing environmental pollutants as well as nitrogen and carbon in its wet, airless soil and in the deep roots of the plants that grow there.

Alfie here! Today I’m chatting to Eleanor Burton about bird friendly native plants, and especially our native fuchsia. Eleanor is in charge of the collections database at Otari, and is also an arborist, botanist, and botanical illustrator.