Environmental Information key contacts

Rob has been involved for 38 years in diverse areas of coastal engineering, coastal/shelf physical oceanography, natural physical hazards, risk assessment, water quality, wastewater discharges and climate-change impacts and adaptation. His expertise includes numerical modelling (hydrodynamic flows, discharges and sediment transport), coastal and estuarine oceanography, natural hazard and risk assessments, coastal climate-change and sea-level rise guidance, assessment of environmental effects (AEE's) for coastal roading projects, port developments, dredging and sand-extraction impacts, wastewater discharges and the design of monitoring programmes.

Rob also interfaces with coastal policy and planning. He was the Coordinating Lead Author of the 2017 Coastal Hazards and Climate Change guidance for local government published by the Ministry for the Environment and was a contributing author of the recent implementation guidance on the coastal hazard policies in the NZ Coastal Policy Statement, published by the Dept. of Conservation. He has acted as an expert witness at several Environment Court or Board of Inquiry hearings. Rob also regularly acts as a peer reviewer and has given numerous presentations to councillors, public groups and conferences and is in regular demand by the media on coastal processes, climate change and hazard/risk matters.

Rob has considerable experience in consultancies for coastal environmental impact studies and input to coastal engineering project design (including coastal roads and bridges, ocean outfalls, stormwater outlets, water quality monitoring, coastal hazards, ship-handling, harbour dredging and disposal, sand extraction, coastal reclamations and airport upgrade projects).

Rob is a certified Hearings Commissioner under the Making Good Decisions programme, chartered member of the Engineers NZ (CMEngNZ) and a Chartered Professional Engineer CPEng (Environmental Engineering). 

Roddy has a BE (Civil) and MSc (Resource Management) from the University of Canterbury. He has worked in the field of hydrology for more than 39 years. In that time he has been involved in research into channel erosion processes, high intensity rainfall in the Southern Alps, estimation of hydrological parameters in ungauged basins, revision of flood frequency estimation methods for New Zealand, and quality assurance of hydrological data. His many commercial projects involving hydrological data analysis and simulation, are generally either related to hydro-power projects (new and existing), flood and low flow frequency analysis, water supply systems, or estimation in locations with little or no data. He has prepared and presented 20 briefs of evidence as an expert witness to regional council hearings and the Environment Court.

EI Role: Coordinator, NIWA Marine Databases. Kevin Mackay (Bsc. Hons) is a geologist who as been working for NIWA for 22 years in the Fisheries and Ocean Geology groups. He has experience in relational database management and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). He has worked extensively with a variety of data sets in the marine environment including geology and geophysics, hydrography, freshwater fisheries, oceanography, fisheries, and biodiversity. Since 2010, he has been the IODE (Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO, International Oceanographic Data and Information Exchange) National Coordinator for Oceanographic Data Management. 

EI Role: Coordinator, NIWA Product Database and Delivery. Bernard is an ex-meteorologist with a BSc (Hons Physics) and MSc (Meteorology) from McGill University (Canada). He manages the forecasting and remote sensing operation part of EcoConnect, where several numerical models developed at NIWA are producing twice daily weather, ocean and river forecasts and satellite images are processed mainly for commercial and research users. Bernard was a meteorologist and sea ice forecaster for over 17 years for Environment Canada, and was data manager for a number of years for the CliC-SCAR WMO-WCRP program based at the (Norwegian Polar Institute, Norway) and the IODP program (Hokkaido University, Japan). 

EI Role:  Project Manager, Climate Database. Group Manager, Climate Data and Applications. This group manages the National Climate Database CLIDB, and the associated services that contribute to the science and applications of NIWA's National Climate Centre. Alan is also Project Manager for a range of climate early warning system developments in Pacific SIDS, including the development of the CliDEsc software platform. My background is in agriculture, having worked on a range of farms, and managed an experimental pedigree Jersey dairy farm in India for almost 10 years. I have a Diploma of Field Technology from Lincoln University, and a WMO post graduate certificate in Agricultural Meteorology gained in Israel. Gaps in my education have been plugged by extra mural papers from Massey University. Prior to the establishment of NIWA I was a research assistant at the New Zealand Meteorological Service. 

Dr. Kareen Schnabel is a taxonomist and systematist focussing her researach on New Zealand decapod crustaceans. She was the Collection Manager of the NIWA Invertebrate Collection between 2006 and 2015.