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A weekly programme featuring a mix of sound-rich stories about science, the environment and medical research, recorded around New Zealand in laboratories and in the field. Our Changing World is broadcast nationwide on Thursday nights on Radio New Zealand National, during Nights with Bryan Crump. It is preceded in this recording by a news and sports bulletin, and weather forecast. In today's programme:
21:06
Getting Wet and Experiencing Marine Reserves
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Since 2002 the Experiencing Marine Reserves programme has been taking primary school students snorkelling so they can see for themselves how effective marine protection is
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By Alison Ballance
“The formula is – give them a bit of information, give them an amazing experience and then get them to put it into action in some way. And after they’ve done that the kids really can tell you a whole lot about what’s different inside and outside a marine reserve.”
Zoe Studd, Experiencing Marine Reserves co-ordinator, Wellington
Since 2002 the Experiencing Marine Reserves programme has been taking primary school students around the country to snorkel inside and outside marine reserves, so they can see for themselves how effective marine protection is. The kids snorkel first in an unprotected area, and they find this exciting as for many of them it is their first experience of snorkelling in the sea. But the biggest excitement comes when they open their eyes underwater in a marine reserve, and find it teeming with life. “We’re really lucky because we’ve got Taputeranga Marine Reserve right on our back door step,” says Wellington Experiencing Marine Reserves (EMR) co-ordinator Zoe Studd.
Teacher ‘Mr Matt’, as he is known to his class of year 5 and 6 pupils at St Anne’s School in Newtown, says he and his class “have been learning about marine reserves, and how we can protect our sea life so that there’s plenty around for generations to come.”
“We snorkelled last week at Worser Bay beach, which is an unprotected area. And even though for many of us it was our first time seeing the mussels, a little bit of seaweed and a couple of spotties, and it was really exciting, I’ve been fortunate to do it before and I know that what we’re going to see today [in Taputeranga Marine Reserve] is going to blow their minds, because there’s lots out there.”
Julian Hodge is Discovery Programme Manager for the Island Bay Marine Education Centre, which hosts the EMR programme at Taputeranga, and he says that the programme is a great way introducing adults, as well as pupils, to the concept of marine protection. For safety, each buddy pair of children go out in the water with an adult, who might be a marine biology student volunteer, or a teacher aide or parent from the school. “Not only does it help us with the supervision and the safety aspect but also we know the programme is reaching more than just the kids. It’s a double good for us when we get so many parents and aunties and uncles coming along as well.”
The St Anne’s School students I spoke to after the marine reserve snorkel were excited about what they had seen, including several large eagle rays and associated cleaner fish, as well as large paua, blue cod, spotties, kina, blue moki and other fish. They all commented on how much more they saw in the marine reserve than at unprotected Worser Bay.
One of the parent helpers said she had never done anything like it before.
“It was so cool. And it was amazing that it was so close to the actual beach – and there’s all that sea life that I didn’t realise was so accessible. I’m so pleased I took the day off work!”
The Experiencing Marine Reserves programme is time-consuming to run as each school takes part for about a week in total, over the course of a term. The programme begins with a class session learning about the sea. Then, learning to snorkel in a local pool, when students discover how a dive mask lets them see underwater, they experience breathing through a snorkel, and they learn about underwater safety. The safety essentials include sticking together with their buddy pair, signs to indicate that they’re okay, and understanding whistle signals from the shore.
After their snorkel in an unprotected area followed by one in a protected area the students work on action plans and creative projects. Zoe says a previous class made ‘Seed to Sea’ envelopes, containing seeds suitable to plant along streams and waterways, in an effort to prevent sediment running into the sea. Art works, songs and dance have also been used by the students to express their experience. One of the students from St Anne’s school, Enzo Rabino, won the Experiencing Marine Reserves Boddy Stafford Poor Knights Competition, which involved him in a snorkelling trip to the Poor Knights Islands Marine Reserve.
The Wellington Experiencing Marine Reserves programme worked with three schools during the first term of 2015. Houghton Valley School were also involved in an ongoing marine reserve monitoring programme. The programme provides all the wet suits and snorkel equipment for the students and adults.
As well as Experiencing Marine Reserves Zoe Studd is also involved in two other hands-on outdoor education projects: Healthy Harbours Porirua, and Whitebait Connection, which has previously featured on Our Changing World.
Topics: science, environment, education
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Tags: Taputeranga Marine Reserve, Island Bay, marine protection, snorkelling, outdoor education, eagle ray, fish, primary school
Duration: 14'11"
21:20
Kelp, Urchins and Marine Reserves
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Marine biologist Nick Shears monitors marine reserves to evaluate how effective marine protection is and he is also interested in the effects of climate change on the ocean
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By Alison Ballance
Underwater ‘crop circles’ that have been made in kelp forest around the Hauraki Gulf are part of a global experiment, and marine biologist Nick Shears hopes they will also show us how resilient – or not - the dominant kelp species around New Zealand might be in the face of climate change.
“The idea is that kelp forest researchers all around the world are removing kelp in different temperature regimes and we’re going to look at how the recovery rates vary with temperature,” says Nick. “As well, here in the Hauraki Gulf we have a big turbidity gradient, so we’re also interested in how temperature changes might interact with light. Obviously when it’s warmer the plant respires more, so it also needs to photosynthesis more to make up for that – and to do that it needs more light.”
One of the expected consequences of climate change will be an increase in severe weather events, such as the recent heavy rainfalls experienced in Dunedin and the Kapiti Coast (check out this week’s Extreme Weather and Climate Change story for more about that). While most people are focused on what the impacts of this will be on land, marine biologists are concerned about the flow-on effects to neighbouring coastal ecosystems. Nick explains:
“One of the expectations of climate change will be reductions in light due to more storms, more runoff and more sediment coming in. But also with more sea level rise you’re going to have more coastal erosion bringing in more sediment and causing lower light.”
Ecklonia radiata is northern New Zealand’s most common kelp species, and it is also found in Australia, in much warmer conditions than it lives in here. It is considered to be a keystone species, which underpins the coastal ecosystem. If the recruitment and survival of the kelp is affected by warming temperature and increasing sedimentation, it could have a significant impact on the healthy functioning of our marine ecosystem.
While long term sea temperature records collected from the Leigh Marine Laboratory do not yet indicate any increase in temperature, Nick says that the ocean near the Portobello Marine Laboratory in Dunedin has begun to warm, as has water around Tasmania. These increases are due to increases in the intensity of the South Pacific sub-tropical gyre.
A major part of Nick’s research is involved in studying marine reserves and monitoring the impact of protection. He carried out PhD research in the Leigh marine reserve where, prior to protection, large numbers of sea urchins, Evechinus chloroticus, had created significant areas of kina barrens. Full protection 40 years ago has led to an increase in the numbers of big predators such as crayfish and snapper, and a subsequent improvement in the kelp forest as the predators eat the kina that were eating the kelp.
Nick has recently been involved in monitoring at the Poor Knights Islands marine reserve. While there are good numbers of snapper at the Poor Knights, there have always been very few crayfish. While the number of kina has declined since protection, there has been a big increase in the numbers of a large black subtropical long-spined urchin called Centrostephanus rodgersii.
The same species has relatively recently established in Tasmanian waters, where it is overgrazing seaweeds and invertebrates on rocky reefs and creating urchin barrens. It has established there due to the same changes in the temperature and strength of East Australia Current that are increasing sea temperatures in southern New Zealand, and it is having a detrimental effect on lobster and abalone fisheries. Nick is not sure why they’re increasing here since there is no evidence of warming sea temperatures, and he speculates that as they are larger than kina snapper alone may not be able to control them in the absence of crayfish
"They’re a more intense grazer than the regular kina and will graze right down to bare coralline. So they’ve had a big impact in Tasmania, and we’ll just need to keep an eye on what’s happening with them here."
Nick holds joint positions in the Institute of Marine Science and the Department of Statistics at the University of Auckland. In 2011 he was awarded a Rutherford Discovery Fellowship from the Royal Society of New Zealand to support his research into kelp forests and rocky reef ecosystems.
You can listen to the audio or download a podcast of Nick's interview here:
Topics: science, environment
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Tags: marine reserves, Marine Protected Areas, conservation, Poor Knights Islands, Leigh marine reserve, fish, blue cod, crayfish, lobster, sea urchins, kina
Duration: 12'40"
21:34
Examining the Benefits of Standing Desks
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Masters student Dan Archer looked at metabolic biomarkers to see if there were benefits from working at standing desks
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By Ruth Beran
There’s a lot of hype at the moment about standing up desks, with proponents touting the benefits of standing at work rather than sitting for long periods of time.
To analyse the hype, Unitec Masters of osteopathy student Dan Archer set about trying to measure the effects of standing desks on six participants’ health, over 19 weeks. In particular, he was looking at metabolic health.
I believe there is data to show that we can reduce the risk of metabolic syndrome particularly in sedentary people, people who sit down at the office all day,” says Dan.
Metabolic syndrome is a cluster of conditions that occur together, increasing the risk of heart disease, stroke and diabetes. These cluster of conditions are increased blood pressure, a high blood sugar level, excess body fat around the waist and abnormal cholesterol levels. To measure metabolic biomarkers, Dan was tracking blood pressure, waist circumference, height, fasting glucose, triglyceride (or fat) levels, and cholesterol in the blood.
Participants were people who primarily sit in the workplace, and were of different genders and ethnicities. People used the desks for 19 weeks, with the first three weeks being an introductory phase where participants could stand for an hour or so at a time.
Ultimately the study did not show huge changes in metabolic markers, although there was a decrease in waist circumference in some participants. Dan believes this may be because the study wasn’t long enough. “Over the 17 weeks we saw changes in some people but it might be that over a year we’d see even better changes,” says Dan. Also the factors being measured were quite transient, dependent on factors that are hard to control, like diet and lifestyle.
Anecdotally though the standing desks were a success, with all participants showing a marked decrease in their daily sitting time and marked increase in daily standing time. The smallest increase in standing was 111 minutes, and the smallest change in daily sitting was a decrease of close to two hours a day. “I had people reporting that they felt more comfortable during the day, less fatigued and more energetic. Some people mentioned slightly higher concentration levels,” says Dan.
There were also some slight negative effects associated with switching to the standing desk, with some reports of mild discomfort in the lower back. “We tried to ease those with certain stretches and exercises, but overall there was a very positive response to it," says Dan.
All but one of the participants chose to continue to stand after the study.
The changes in daily sitting and standing times were evident across the entire period. “So people didn’t revert back to sitting down once they got used to it, or the novelty of the standing desk wore off,” says Dan. This makes him think that standing desks are a viable solution for intervention into occupational sedentary behaviour, even though the six participants in the study were biased because they were already interested in standing desks before the study started.
Dan believes that a larger study could examine how viable standing desks are, and what kind of changes to sitting and standing happen over a longer period of time.
Topics: health, science
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Tags: standing desks, health, biomarkers, metabolic, metabolic syndrome
Duration: 12'57"
21:45
Extreme Weather and Climate Change
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Climate scientists are using the spare capacity of thousands of home computers to zoom in on links between extreme weather events and climate change
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New Zealand is already nearly a degree warmer than it would have been without climate change. But also our rainfall extremes and our droughts, and the frequency and risk of those, are already changing as a result of climate change.
Dunedin was swamped by two months’ worth of rain in a single day last week, causing widespread flood damage.
The southern deluge followed record rainfalls dumped down on the North Island's Kapiti Coast and in other parts of New Zealand.
Climate scientists say they believe climate change is contributing to such extreme weather events.
National Institute of Water and Atmosphere (NIWA) climate scientist Suzanne Rosier heads the Weather@home project, which pools the spare computing capacity donated by thousands of volunteers to run state-of-the-art regional climate models.
The regional scale of the models allows her to capture weather patterns in more detail than would otherwise be possible, and the combined computing power means she can zoom in on how extreme weather events are affected by climate change.
“Collectively, the volunteers produce an awesome force of computing power, bigger than the world’s fastest super computer, and this has enabled scientists to run these models many thousands of times, orders of magnitude bigger than scientists can usually expect to run complex models. The combination of computing power with higher resolution modelling means that we can capture some of the rarest events and get at the statistics of these sorts of events.”
Attributing climate change influence to individual weather events is an emerging area of research but the project, which is part of the international climateprediction.net effort, means scientists are getting a better handle on the risk of such events in a warming world.
NIWA chief scientist for climate, atmosphere and hazards Sam Dean said it was too early to know how big a role climate change played in the Dunedin floods but the project had studied past events such as the 2011 floods in Golden Bay, when 650mm of rain fell within 48 hours, and last year’s drought.
"What we found in the Golden Bay study was that the moisture available for those kinds of rainfall events has increased. What we found for the drought was that the risk was increased because of the combination of climate change as well as ozone depletion. The ozone hole forming over Antarctica every spring has changed how often we get high pressures and how intense they are over New Zealand, and that’s had a big impact on droughts over New Zealand.”
Four months ago, the Weather@home project launched a specific experiment to investigate last winter’s floods in Northland, when five days of extremely heavy rain caused severe damage.
Dr Rosier said when she compared models runs of actual conditions with those that simulate how things might have been without human influence on the climate, she could “indeed see a change in the risk of such an event, such that it had become more likely”.
Dr Dean said New Zealand was exposed to conveyor belts, or atmospheric rivers, which brought moist air from the tropics.
Most of our extreme rainfall events are caused by subtropical air coming out of the tropics, very wet, and as climate change warms the tropics it causes more moisture to be held in that air. So as it comes down to New Zealand those air flows do carry more moisture. They can also actually potentially speed up, so it’s both the rate at which that moisture comes down as well as the [increased] moisture content that's in the air.
The team had not yet looked at the Dunedin floods in detail but Dr Dean said “you probably will find that it is possible to understand that there is a contribution ... from climate change and that increase of moisture in the atmosphere”.
He said while atmospheric changes brought higher rainfalls, the fact that such record downpours caused flooding had more to do with inadequate infrastructure.
“One of the things you might see in climate change is that systems that were built to carry water out of the cities are a certain size and used to historical amounts of water. Now as we’re seeing increased amounts of water, you might see systems starting to fail, and that's a question of planning and investment and increasing our infrastructure to cope with a changing world.”
Dr Dean said one of the reasons the project was investigating specific weather events was to “help people understand that climate change is something that is here now and that it affects our lives today”.
It’s not something that is just a problem for the future. We're trying to understand that we live in a different world already because of what we have done to the atmosphere via emitting greenhouse gases and, for New Zealand in fact, ozone depletion as well, which has a significant effect on our climate.
He said New Zealand was already nearly 1degC warmer than it would have been without climate change. “But also our rainfall extremes and our droughts, and the frequency and risk of those, is already changing as a result of climate change.”
He said the rainfall extremes would have still been possible, but their risk has changed. However, Dr Rosier said the team had also looked at the record warm winter of 2013, and found that “it really would have been extremely unlikely that such a warm winter would have occurred in New Zealand if there hadn’t been human interference with the climate system”.
Dr Rosier said the team wanted to extend the project to 2030.
“What people mainly want to know now is what do they have to start planning for. We are now able to say with increasing certainty how the risk of extreme weather events is changing with climate change, but ultimately what people really need to know is how this is going to affect them in their daily lives.”
If you would like to join the Weather@home experiment, this page will get you started.
Follow Our Changing World on Twitter
Topics: science, environment
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Tags: climate change, weather, floods, warming, extreme weather events, global climate models, downscaling, regional climate models, National Institute for Water and Atmosphere
Duration: 13'07"