The application of biological information in national and district planning - the biological resources centre's approach

Abstract

The idea for a New Zealand Biological Resources Centre originated at the 49th Congress of ANZAAS in Auckland in January 1979 (Commission for the Environment, 1979, 192). Biologists and planners were concerned that although there was a great deal of research being done and much was known about the indigenous biological resources of New Zealand, this information was not finding its way into the planning processes. Many plant and animal species, communities and landscapes were threatened by, or lost to, development. Planners found it difficult to guide development because any biological information which was available was not in a form that was It readily understood by or useful to them. was also realised that the relative nature conservation values of existing reserves were not known. These concerns led to the establishment in 1981 of a national New Zealand Biological Resources Centre (hereafter the Centre) serviced until recently by the DSIR Head Office and supported financially by several other government departments. operations of the Centre during its first five and a half years were supervised and guided by an advisory committee consisting of representatives from contributing departments and other organisations (Table 1). The primary objective of the Centre is "To improve the flow of information on the nation's biological resources into the planning process" (Biological Resources Centre Advisory Committee, 1982). Its work programme to date has been developed with this objective in mind. Several of the major projects the Centre became involved in during the past few years were not directly related to the originally envisaged work of the Centre. The Centre took the opportunity, when invited, to develop the techniques for rapid ecological survey required for the National Parks and Reserves Authority's New Zealand Protected Natural Areas Programme (Park, 1983; Law et al, 1984; Myers et al, 1987). Centre also undertook the task of entering on computer file data from the national wetlands inventory (Wetlands of Ecological and Representative Importance).