Jon SullivanToday I was teaching a lecture about environmental weeds, for our Applied Ecology and Conservation course at #LincolnUniversityNZ. I showed the class the "Environmental weeds in New Zealand" project on #iNaturalist. That was made by staff at the #DepartmentofConservation to gather observations of DOC's 386 weed species.
These are the plants that DOC has assessed as being fully naturalised wild exotics, already present in natural ecosystems, and likely to be having more than minor impacts on NZ ecosystems. iNat currently has 199,588 observations of 379 of these species.
On a whim, in class I decided to see how many of these environmental weeds were present on the university campus.
Was it 10? Maybe 20?
No, 109 species.
Like a lot of urban and rural areas in NZ, our campus is a reservoir of weeds.
https://inaturalist.nz/projects/environmental-weeds-in-new-zealand
