Introducing Lakes380

Lakes380 is a nationwide project to collect data on 10% of Aotearoa New Zealand’s 3,800 lakes that are over 1 ha in size. Dr Susie Wood from Cawthron Institute and Dr Marcus Vandergoes from GNS Science co-lead the overall project. Dr Christopher Moy from the University of Otago leads the project measuring the impact of climate change on lakes.

Questions for discussion

• Why do you think so few lakes – prior to Lakes380 – have been monitored and for such a short period of time?

• How will the scientists gain information about the past history of the lakes?

• Why is it important for the project to have iwi input?

Transcript

Dr Susie Wood

New Zealand has 3,800 lakes that are greater than 1 hectare in size, and when we look at how much scientifically we know about those lakes or how many of these lakes we monitor, it’s less than 200 of them, and those lakes that we do monitor, the monitoring records are only about 10 or 20 years long and so we know nothing about what those lakes were like prior to human arrival in New Zealand. And so I guess the genesis for Lakes380 was this real lack of scientific information and this inability to be able to help design restoration programmes. 

Dr Marcus Vandergoes

We started the project, we were doing some pilot work on a lake over in the Wairarapa at the bottom of the North Island. So we’d been monitoring that lake for a few years and we’d noticed that it had been having these algal blooms and so we were trying to develop a pilot project to understand why that might be. But we devised it that we would look at what was happening in the modern system – so in the lake that’s going on now – but we would also use the mud cores from the bottom of the lake to look back in time to see that if that had been a naturally occurring event or whether that was something in more recent. 

Dr Susie Wood

Of our lowland lakes, probably somewhere in the order of 50% of them are deteriorating in their health, so the aim of Lakes380 is to characterise the current and historic health of 10% of New Zealand’s lakes. And we’re doing that by collecting water and sediment samples to characterise what’s, what lives there now and what the water quality is like, and then we’re also taking sediment cores. So sediment cores are like a storybook back in time, and we can go back and analyse these cores and learn more about what our lakes were once like and how and why they’ve changed. 

We’re working with iwi right the way across the country, and there’s two different components to that. One is making sure that we’re sampling lakes that are culturally significant, that we’re not sampling lakes that are wahi tapu or sacred and that we can work with them and share some of the information that we’re gathering but also hear their stories and histories of the lake because they are equally as important, and when we combine those different knowledge streams, we can have a much more enriched knowledge of our lakes and their health.

Dr Marcus Vandergoes

I think the main hope is a better understanding of lakes, their history and what has brought them to where they are now and also a better understanding for New Zealanders of the lakes that we have – an appreciation of them so that we can manage them in a lot better way moving forward. 

Dr Christopher Moy

My role in this project is to investigate past climate change and see how climate change impacts lake water quality. So what’s fantastic about the Lakes380 project is we’re in the process of collecting literally hundreds of sediment cores from around the country. And from this network of lake sediments and lake sediment cores, we can use them to get a better understanding of how climate has changed during the past millennium. 

Dr Susie Wood

There’s eight different organisations from New Zealand involved in the Lakes380 project, and they involve universities and it’s led by Cawthron Institute and GNS Science, and then there’s a whole group of international collaborators that are working on the project. The team now would be something over 70 researchers.

Dr Marcus Vandergoes

Working with all those diverse people – great colleagues in amongst that as well – is really inspiring. Everybody has a passion for what they’re doing and to be able to do that at such a scale, you know, on a national basis. It’s a globally unique project in that way – there’s nothing like it being done anywhere else in the world to the scale of what we’re doing. So that as well brings it all together to make it really neat and interesting.