Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand最新文献

In this paper we test a long-held assumption regarding Otago, New Zealand, goldfields life and death- that scurvy was a ubiquitous and persistent cause of misery and death among the goldminers. We will also explore a parallel argument that the Chinese market gardeners played a large role in stamping out the disease in the goldfields. Through the interrogation of various archival medical primary sources, we show that scurvy was indeed a terrible scourge in the Otago goldfields, but only during the initial rushes into new regions. We also argue that while Chinese market gardeners undoubtedly contributed to a more nutritious and varied diet for European miners and settlers, scurvy had already markedly reduced in frequency by the time of their arrival in the gold fields. Patient-oriented accounts of scurvy in the gold demonstrate the clinical and functional cost of scurvy in during the initial gold rushes of Otago. Furthermore, individual stories of previously anonymous patients found locked in these archival sources demonstrate the importance of re-humanising the past to understand the biological and social context of these frontier times.

Climate change poses a significant challenge for forest growers. However, understanding climate change adaptation including the behaviour and decisions of forest growers remains unexplored in New Zealand, despite the forestry sector being a significant export leader and major contributor to regional economies. To explore this, we conducted surveys of 60 forest growers from organisations which collectively manage more than 70% of New Zealand's plantation forests. The results showed that 47% of the respondents perceived that climate change will affect their forest growing, and 60% perceived that climate change will increase wildfire frequency and pest and disease outbreaks. Only 21% of the respondents reported that they had taken adaptation measures directly. Lack of resources and motivation were among the barriers that respondents identified. A logistic regression analysis revealed that climate change perception, research to improve forest growers' adaptive capacity, climate change information, forest grower age and forestry experience are significantly associated with actual adaptation decisions. Risk perceptions central to protection motivation theory (e.g. vulnerability, probability and severity) were not linked to actual adaptation decisions, suggesting that widening adaptation analyses beyond individual perceptions as predictors of climate change adaptation may provide insights for fit-for-purpose climate change adaptation policies for the sector.

Flooding is Aotearoa-New Zealand's most frequent natural hazard, and there is high confidence that climate change is making extreme rainfall events more frequent and intense. Additionally, there are significant development pressures which could both increase the number of people and assets at risk and the flood hazard. To date, there is no publicly available consistent approach to accurately determine flood risk on a national scale, nor for how this may be changing; although there is a growing legislative requirement to provide quality information over multiple spatial scales. This paper draws on empirical data to gain insights on how to best manage changing flood risks in Aotearoa-New Zealand from the perspective of centrally organised entities. Findings confirm the need for a nationally consistent approach to flood risk management, better understanding of Aotearoa's communities and their vulnerability to floods, equitable access to quality information and decision-support tools, and better understanding of the economic impacts on differing communities, regions and places. The paper concludes that to achieve a flood-resilient Aotearoa, flood governance needs to be reconfigured to achieve national consistency in flood risk management whilst enabling targeted variability at the local scale.

This essay offers reflective learning on how researchers in the Western science tradition connect to bodies of knowledge created and held outside that tradition. It begins with endogenous growth theory, which explains the unique role of knowledge as an input into economic production. The essay describes how Western science addresses the problem of validating and accessing knowledge, by hosting an expanding corpus of peer-reviewed publications. This academic knowledge does not contain all current knowledge. The essay therefore draws on the authors' experience in four large research programmes to consider business knowledge and mātauranga Māori. It reflects on agency, tikanga [right behaviour], global conversations about Indigenous knowledge, and decolonising research. The essay finishes with models of knowledge engagement in the interface between western Science and mātauranga Māori that support the mana and integrity of diverse knowledge streams.

Alongside a marked increase in the population of older New Zealanders has been an increase in tooth retention: more and more older adults now have at least some of their own teeth. Understanding their oral health demands consideration of their journey along the life course. The common clinical oral conditions - dental caries ('tooth decay') and periodontitis ('gum disease') - are both chronic and cumulative, and highly socially patterned in their occurrence, being more prevalent and severe in those of lower socio-economic position. Those who have ended up with 'good oral health' in old age are those who have had the wherewithal to adapt successfully to their oral disease burden as it has accumulated over the years. In this paper, I consider the utility of the life course approach for interpreting and understanding data, and I apply its principles to a number of important observations on older people's oral health.

Species' with more limited dispersal and consequently less gene flow are more likely to form new spatially segregated species and thus contribute disproportionally to endemic biota and global species richness. Aotearoa New Zealand has exceptional endemicity, with 52% of its 54,000 named species endemic, including 32%, 39% and 68% for freshwater, marine and terrestrial environments respectively. The lower endemicity of freshwater biota (excluding insects) is attributed to their need to disperse between habitats that are temporary on evolutionary timescales. The percent endemicity of higher taxa (Order to Kingdom), a measure of phylogenetic relationships, was not correlated with regional and global species richness. However, there was a positive correlation between endemicity and species richness across dispersal trait groups based on their environment, typical body size, mobility (including flight), and if marine, whether pelagic or benthic. Typically flighted taxa had high endemicity contrary to the dispersal-endemicity hypothesis, but reflecting exceptional isolation by distance and time, and reduced flight ability as occurs on islands. It is proposed that the high richness and endemicity of mobile macrofauna is caused by a combination of niche specialisation opportunities and predation limiting dispersal respectively. Thus, dispersal traits better predicted endemicity and global species richness than phylogeny.