Forest Talk

Selwyn is considering a policy of “replacing one tree with at least two” after Rolleston was shown to have one of the lowest numbers of trees for a town in the country.

This comes a week after a study was released by the University of Canterbury’s School of Forestry, led by Professor Justin Morgenroth and Dr Ning Ye.

It showed Rolleston’s tree canopy cover was 7.9%, ranking it 77 out of 78 cities and towns in the study.

Other Canterbury t..... more

The fifth annual John Deere Technician of the Year Awards honour the essential work technicians do every day to support industries critical to New Zealand’s economy and rural and regional communities.

A trailblazing female apprentice, a part-time farmer, an accomplished linguist, and a technician who prides himself on his ‘Kiwi ingenuity’ are the four New Zealand John Deere technicians who have earned their place in this year’s prestigious Technician..... more

A 43-person Fire and Emergency New Zealand taskforce adds to the existing assistance in Canada this week for the Manitoba province’s wildfire response.

A seven-person specialist team is now joined by an agency representative, two taskforce leaders and eight five-person arduous firefighting crews.

Like the specialist team, they will be deployed for approximately five weeks.

Canada is currently experiencing a severe wildfire season and all ..... more

Fatigue is a big risk in forestry, especially for manual tree-fallers. Fatigue can hurt because tired people are more likely to make poor decisions. So, it’s really important to manage fatigue and there are many different ways to do that. 

Recently we caught up with Alan Paulson, to talk about how he manages the risk of fatigue in his manual felling crew. Alan, who owns Tairāwhiti Timber Training, is a Safetree Certification faller and runs a sp..... more

Jim Childerstone, long-time columnist for NZ Logger, recently passed away. Along with forestry and writing, he was a man of many talents – fencer, shearer, shepherd mountaineer, keen sportsman and ‘there wasn’t much he couldn’t shoot between the eyes with his trusty 303, says his wife Margot. 

His love of nature began at an early age when living with his aunt Jeannie and uncle Kim Ferguson in  Arrowtown during the mid-forties. Kim ..... more

As part of research aimed at improving wood quality and producing materials to support New Zealand’s bioeconomy, Scion has launched the world’s first field trial of gene-edited conifer.

The Crown Research Institute has implemented the advanced gene-editing technique known as CRISPR that lets scientists turn off a specific gene within the pine’s complex genome. This helps them understand what that gene does – which in turn builds understanding of how ..... more