New Zealand (NZ) has a diversity of large river ecosystems that provide essential ecosystem services but are impaired by multiple ecological impacts. River restoration is an active field worldwide and there is good potential for river restoration practitioners in NZ to draw on lessons from elsewhere, although there is also a need to tailor approaches to national and local contexts. Here, we provide a critical review of large f...

Aim Understanding how natural populations respond to climatic shifts is a fundamental goal of biological research in a fast‐changing world. The Southern Ocean represents a fascinating system for assessing large‐scale climate‐driven biological change, as it contains extremely isolated island groups within a predominantly westerly, circumpolar wind and current system. Blue‐eyed shags represent a paradoxical seabird radiation—a c...

Island ecosystems can be severely affected by climate change as they provide limited opportunities for species to track their habitat. Studying the population dynamics of keystone species from these ecosystems can shed a light on climate – ecosystem interactions. Southern beeches are such keystone species in New Zealand with beech forests constituting the most abundant forest cover on the two main islands. Here we use 2.4 kilo...

Three independent scientific lines of evidence were sought to determine the nutrient load limits to safeguard the macrophyte community of an intermittently closed and open lake/lagoon (ICOLL): (1) a literature review identified nitrogen load thresholds related to the collapse of macrophytes in similar systems in Australia, Europe and elsewhere, (2) an ICOLL expert carried out an assessment based on current local data and on da...

Crustaceans were sampled in 17 groundwater wells at five locations in North and South Islands of New Zealand. Three sampling locations were associated with unconfined aquifers adjacent to gravel‐bed rivers, whereas the other two locations were distant from rivers, but associated with land‐based sewage effluent disposal sites. Crustaceans and basic physico‐chemical parameters were sampled in summer and winter. Total abundance v...

We compared the performance of fixed count subsampling (100, 200, and 300 individuals) and coded abundance (rare, common, abundant, very abundant, very very abundant) with full count sampling for rapid assessment biomonitoring. Examining change in the Quantitative Macroin‐vertebrate Community Index (QMCI) and % Ephemeroptera, Plecoptera, and Trichoptera (EPT) values between sites upstream and downstream of pollution inputs, we...

Hyporheic invertebrates were sampled in six small headwater streams draining pine, pasture, and native forest catchments. Sites were sampled in autumn and spring using three different hyporheic sampling methods (colonisation pots, pump sampling, and freeze‐coring). Total invertebrate abundance and taxon richness differed significantly among sites on both sampling occasions for pump samples, whereas freeze‐coring did not discri...

The effects of varying land use on the inputs of litter to streams were investigated in nine small Waikato, New Zealand, hill country streams between June 1995 and October 1997. Mass, timing, and composition of both vertical and lateral litter inputs were measured. Litter inputs to pasture streams were lower than those to streams in native or exotic pine forest. Litter inputs to native forest streams peaked in summer, with lea...

Aquatic macroinvertebrates were sampled annually at 66 sites of the National Rivers Water Quality Network (NRWQN) from 1989 to 1996. At each site, temporal trends in number of taxa, total abundance, Macroinvertebrate Community Index (MCI), the quantitative version of MCI (QMCI), number and percent of Ephemeroptera, Plecoptera, and Trichoptera, Shannon's Diversity Index (H'), Jaccard's similarity index, and Bray‐Curtis similari...

Although the importance of the subsurface saturated interstitial zone (hyporheic zone) to the ecological functioning and maintenance of water quality of stream ecosystems is well known, there is little information on the impacts of different forms of land use upon this zone. Hyporheic physico‐chemistry and invertebrates were compared among small streams draining hill‐country catchments under pasture, exotic pine forest, and na...