by wayno » Sun 07 Mar, 2021 4:59 am
DOC isnt well funded at all. a third of NZ's landmass is managed by DOC. tourism doesnt nearly pay for running the DOC estate. DOC are maintaining less tracks every year. for a long long time they were underfunded and starved of funds, now they are trying to play catchup
a few years ago the budget was $300 million under the national govt, the labour govt gave them a big cash injection but previously they had also let the budget stagnate.
they are looking at removing less used huts... the govt just havent caught up on properly funding DOC, a lot of tracks are high maintence the bush is like jungle and can quickly cover a track without exensive maintenance in a lot of areas.. go to a fiordland great walk before the summer season starts and you'll have a steeplechase to navigate after winter storms. by the start of the summer season the tracks are back to their normal perfect state, '
i was on the kepler. one storm dropped dozens of trees across the track. the standard of the track means that has to be cleared quickly, requiring frequent track maintenance.
they are getting more into the high maintenance track which starve other areas of resourcing, leaving them to wither on the vine
they've been caught out by the explosion in tourism and just left access free and put massive increasing pressure on DOCs scarce resources , forcing them to devote staff to dealing with tourists instead of their core function, conservation, there is a border tax, part of that goes to DOC,
cleaning up the mess left by tourists in DOC parts is straining DOC staff..
the only place doc recover their money is great walks and the tongariro crossing and mt cook. abel tasman park and a select few other places
if a hut burns down its often not replaced, around a hut a year burns down.
their resources are sucked up in specific places.
introduced pests decimate the native bird population, estimated to kill around 20 million native birds a year, numerous species are heading towards extinction, its a massive effort to keep any one of them from extinction, some species only exist in protected areas with heavy pest control measures. theres a reason why you'll be lucky to see a kiwi in the wild, let alone a kakapo or kokako yellowhead, stitchbird, saddleback.
wilding pines are taking over vast areas of the country. outcompeting native trees. possums are a massive problem, our trees have no way to resist them and the leaves are far more easily digested by them, they systematically go for favourite tree species wiping them out in area. massive amounts of DOCs budget it predator control and only in a small minority of DOC parks.. 1080 is the only safe poison to use because it breaks down in water, but thers a lot of nutters who campaign against it as cruel to the animals, not half as cruel as the way millions of native animals are killed by predators every year... if you tramp long enough in nz and are up at night you'll see possums. the SPCA in nz will treat and release pests back into the wild... esp feral cats... you dont think about it but theres millions of possums and cats in the NZ wilderness, you know stoats are bad when yo see them on the tracks during the day.. beech trees are giving off seeds more frequently than they used to, it only used be once every few years now its at least every other year.. the rodent population explodes when that happens, when the seeds are gone they turn on the birds and other native animals. the stoats explode eating the rodents and once the rodent no's drop off turn on the birds even more... dont expect NZ forests to all keep looking the same way in the future...
deer are completely devastating the new plant growth in vast areas of forest, the forest will eventually die out without massive intervention... if you don't know what you're looking at you might think its a healthy forest, plenty of mature trees, but once they start dying off, they won't be replaced, once the canopy opens up the speed of the death of the forest accelerates.
a silent forest in NZ is a very unhealthy ecosystem, when settlers first arrived here they complained about the bird noise and struggling to get to sleep at night.. most nz forests are almost silent now or dead silent..
kea , the vast majority of kea you will see are male. the females do all the nesting in tree trunks and are heavily predated on by stoats which catch them in the nest. a stoat will take the long approach with a kea, bite, retreat, wait, bite, repeat until the kea is dead.
DOC has to spend more of its precious budget on things like sewerage removal because of the increasing no of tourists $100,000 a year on fiordlands great walks... there's about 25 toilets that have to be emptied on the tongariro crossing. most by helicopter.
the national govt stacked DOC full of tourism managers who further shifted DOC's core focus, and dont give a stuff about tramping for seasoned trampers, just about walks for the tourists. they also stripped out a lot of important scientific staff who were the canaries in the coal mine for ecological, environmental and conservation issues, the conservation boards were stacked with busines people, more tourism businesses were allowed to operate in the parks, concessions for major commercial development in parks got further through the approval process that should have been declined initially.... a proposal to drill a road tunnel under the routeburn and dump all the rock on the hollyford riverbed was almost approved, a flood would have eventually carried it into the river , it would be toxic to the environment and kill everything downriver, fiordland rock is very high in toxic mineral content..
a proposal to put a 40km monorail through a beech forest was almost approved near fiordland... most likely both proposals would have run out of money before they were completed and would have left a big industrial mess on parks land that there would have been no money to clean up and remove... the national govt told DOC they had to come up with a lot of their own funding, making it hard to resist business involvement in the parks.. conservation took a bigger and bigger back seat to eco tourism.
theres a massive amount of volunteer involvement with DOC, they have been pushing more and more for it, to do the work they dont have the money for.... a lot of hut rangers are volunteers. massive amounts of conservation, hut maintenance and predator control work is done and often funded by volunteers. there was a big push to remove a lot of huts and it took a lot of backlash from tramping groups to stop it, volunteer groups took over maintenance of the huts, they have to sign binding agreements with DOC for the hut maintenance , which put a lot of groups off getting involved, they wanted to wipe out most of the huts in the Ruahines at one stage, its not a major park where tourists go and DOC don't want to put a lot of money into those areas... but its a park that gets a high usage from locals compared to other parks because its near a lot of centers of population...
the tararuas has had tracks and huts removed, its a heavily used area, because of the relatively high population living around it... parks in the south island have a small fraction of the local population living around them but their funding is exponentially greater. in part because they attract far more tourists...
DOC havent paid much attention to resourcing areas within easy reach of the main population centers.
one of the most popular walks near where i live is a giant trench from all the use it gets that turns into a mud fest when it rains, overgrown with gorse that needs volunteers to clear. but it would rival most tracks in nz for use...
tourists don't come to nz for the city life and night life, we don't hold a candle to major international city destinations. they are here for outdoors recreational and or scenic or relaxing holidays.
from the land of the long white clouds...