The seaweed known colloquially as nori in Japanese - used for making sushi - or karengo in Maori has been reclassified by an international team of scientists including NIWA's Dr Wendy Nelson.
The Ocean Survey 20/20 (OS 20/20) programme is a Government initiative, which aims to provide New Zealand with better knowledge of its ocean territory, including New Zealand's Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), Continental Shelf and the Ross Sea Region.
Understanding how material released into the ocean spreads is very important in the case of oil spills, sediment transport and the release of invasive species.
We need information on the food web structures of our marine ecosystems in order to manage the effects on the ecosystem of fishing, aquaculture and mining, as well as understanding the potential impacts of climate variability and change on our oceans.
Building a publicly-available database from the results of a marine mapping survey of the Bay of Islands provides us with a stocktake of the local aquatic resource, in turn giving us valuable information on what areas we can better manage for the future.
NIWA is working on a ministry-funded project to produce a model, validated by 40 years of historic data, to project future wave and storm surges off the coast for two climate change scenarios.
NIWA has developed an Urban Stormwater Contaminant (USC) model to enable urban planners to predict sedimentation and heavy metal accumulation in estuaries and identify problem areas in order to target mitigation measures.
Our oceans are expected to become more acidic as carbon dioxide concentrations rise. This will likely have impacts on the plankton, which play a major role in ocean ecosystems and processes.
Understanding the complexity of tidal resources in New Zealand’s coastal waters and examining how extracting tidal energy would influence and be influenced by this variability.
Satellite images can be used to measure phytoplankton biomass in the ocean around New Zealand in order to understand ocean ecosystems, fish populations and greenhouse gas absorbtion.
This programme is about providing improved knowledge of the causes and potential consequences of coastal hazards in New Zealand, and how often they might pose a threat.
