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Environment
Pascale Lubbe, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Molecular Ecology, University of Otago

Loss of forests brought new birds to NZ during the last Ice Age – we’re witnessing a similar process now

Royal spoonbills are among several new species that have crossed the Tasman and naturalised in New Zealand. JJ Harrison/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

When people arrived on the shores of Aotearoa New Zealand and began to turn the land to their needs, they set in motion great changes.

The landscape of today bears little resemblance to that of a mere thousand years ago. More than 70% of forest cover has been lost since human arrival. Native bush has been replaced by tussocks, scrublands and, most of all, open agricultural land.

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