**8. References**

216 Biodiversity Loss in a Changing Planet

of data, application is limited at the various levels and components of biodiversity. In other words, provisions can not be assessed at multiple scales (i.e. habit, community and/or species). Third, the condition of indigenous forest and grassland assumes that all sites are characterised by one condition, though condition could vary within large sites. For wetlands, the condition does vary per site, but it is based on landscape indicators. It is appropriate for a rapid assessment of sites, and can help for prioritising field visits (Ausseil

The loss of indigenous forest is well characterised by the habitat provision analysis, but the gain of indigenous forest from regenerating indigenous shrublands is not. This is because both the LCDB and the LUM datasets focus on mapping change primarily between woody and herbaceous vegetation, and the subtle changes in the spectral signature of regenerating indigenous forest and mature forest are not accurately characterised or determined, making it difficult to decide whether indigenous vegetation is mature enough to be classified as forest. This is important because there are large areas of indigenous shrublands in New Zealand, approximately 1.6 million hectares. Much of these shrublands are currently regenerating to forest and could make a significant contribution to the areal extent of indigenous forest if this trend continues. If we assume a conservative time of 100 years to reach forest maturity and a uniform distribution of shrubland age, then we would expect about 1% of the shrubland area to change to indigenous forest each year – this amounts to 16 thousand hectares per year. Over 18 years this would equate to approximately 300 thousand hectares, which is six times the estimated current loss of indigenous forest. This fills an important information gap in our understanding of the changing areal extent of indigenous forest and indicates the importance of using objective mapping techniques to monitor

Conservation management in New Zealand is becoming increasingly strategic, systematic, and reliant on accurate information on which to plan and prioritise goals and actions. A range of sophisticated tools and approaches have been developed to support these efforts in the past ten years. These include measuring Conservation Achievement (Stephens et al., 2002), the Land Environments of New Zealand (Leathwick et al., 2003), and measuring provision of natural habitat (Dymond et al., 2008). In addition, these efforts have spawned considerable activity for acquiring underlying data, such as biodiversity value (Cieraad, 2008), land cover (the LCDB3 project), and threats to biodiversity (Overton et al., 2003; Walker et al., 2006). However, a national coordinated approach to conservation management taking into account species distributions is required. Overton et al. (2010) are developing a tool called Vital Sites to assess ecological integrity. This incorporates current and natural distributions of native species based on a modeling approach, pressures (e.g., pests or habitat loss) on biodiversity, and the effects of management on relieving pressures. It operates at two levels (species and landscape) and assessments of significance and priorities can be made at each separate level or by combining the two levels. This research tool will provide another step to helping achieve goals towards identifying the most vulnerable ecosystems in New Zealand requiring urgent protection and management.

This work was supported by the New Zealand Foundation for Research, Science, and Technology through Contract C09X0912 "An ecosystem services approach to optimise natural resource use for multiple outcomes" to Landcare Research. The authors would like

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change.

**7. Acknowledgment** 


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**10** 

Peter Stride

*Australia* 

**Limited Bio-Diversity and Other Defects** 

**of the Immune System in the Inhabitants** 

Intra-species variations in Homo sapiens can contribute to health and resistance to infection, or alternatively to death and disease. The small isolated population of the St Kilda archipelago in the Scottish Hebrides suffered severely from many infectious diseases in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, with greater morbidity and mortality than the

inhabitants of similar Scottish communities on other remote islands.

**1. Introduction** 

Fig. 1. Map of Scotland

**of the Islands of St Kilda, Scotland** 

*University of Queensland School of Medicine* 

St Kilda

