Last Thursday I was happy to be a part of a data collection trip to the Department of Conservation (DoC) office in Tauranga. Myself, Michael Martin (supervisor) and Amber Peek (postgrad student) travelled all the way to the Bay of Plenty to gauge how the local rangers feel towards different forest user groups and their impact in spreading Kauri Dieback.

The first hour was spent discussing and listing all user groups that DoC could identify. Following this, we prompted the rangers to rank the users’ risk in spreading the disease relative to one another. Taking the top five risk groups, the DoC staff then plotted what they considered the highest risk areas that these groups were travelling to. As always, the results were extremely interesting and highly varied compared to other regions.

I also got the opportunity to get some live testing of the Virtual Reality (VR) app I have been developing, which got great feedback. None of the rangers had much experience with VR, so the fact that they could see the benefit of what I have been developing was amazing.

On our drive home, we took a quick detour into the foothills of the Kaimai ranges to do some filming. The Kauri were beautiful, and always remind us of why we are going to all this effort.

Thanks for reading :)