Kahikatea Green Wheel

Why kahikatea forest? •
Here’s how it works •
Get KGW scores from our kahikatea forest map •
Landowner guide •
My Kahikatea Green Wheel •
Completed KGW example •
Animal monitoring •
Characteristic plants and bird food •
For the botanists •
Frequently asked questions

The Kahikatea Green Wheel can help you if you are:

currently restoring or planning to restore a kahikatea forest patch on your land.
managing a reserve or covenant with kahikatea forest.
needing to show funders you are making a difference.
wanting to check on the health of your kahikatea forest patch, or track how your restoration project is going.

If you are putting time and money into protecting and enhancing your kahikatea forest patch, it’s worth checking on how it’s doing to make sure your efforts are paying off.

Why kahikatea forest?

Kahikatea (Dacrycarpus dacrydioides) is an ancient podocarp and New Zealand’s tallest native tree. Before humans arrived in the Waikato, around 200,978 hectares of kahikatea forest grew in the wet areas beside lakes and swamps, and on floodplains.

Today there are only around 3965 hectares – a 98 per cent decrease. Many are secondary forests, grown anew on land previously cleared by early settlers. They are tiny, mostly under 5 hectares, and vulnerable to pests, stock damage and other threats.

Yet they remain a classic landscape feature of the Waikato lowlands – often the only native vegetation around – and provide core habitat and stepping stones for native birds.

Waikato Regional Council has taken steps to encourage protection and restoration of these iconic indigenous forest stands.

The council:

supports kahikatea research and monitoring
encourages landowners to protect and enhance kahikatea forest patches
provides funding incentives and how-to factsheets for people who want to restore or replant kahikatea forest
created the Kahikatea Green Wheel for landowners to check on the health and recovery progress of their kahikatea forest.

Here’s how it works

Use the KGW guide to score 31 important features (sub-attributes) from 1-5.
Plug your results into a spreadsheet.
Instantly create a wheel chart which shows how well your site is doing.

The greener your wheel spokes, the healthier and better managed your site is.

To score your kahikatea site you will need to visit it to collect data. You may need a botanist to collect some of the information, but this will only need to be done every five years. Some of the information you will need is on our kahikatea forest map.

Use the tools and documents below to complete your Kahikatea Green Wheel.

Get KGW scores from our kahikatea forest map

You can get scores for five of the KGW sub-attributes from our website.

Find your kahikatea patch on the Biodiversity and Environment map, and write on your Site Datasheet the Kahikatea Green Wheel scores for sub-attribute numbers 12, 13, 14, 24 and 25.

To find your kahikatea patch:

Open the Biodiversity and Environment Map (refer to the below screen shot of the map).
Ensure the ‘Layers List’ box is visible on the right. If not click the ‘layers’ button on the top toolbar.
Tick Biodiversity and Environment and click the little triangle beside it to open more layers.
Tick Kahikatea and the triangle beside it.
Tick Kahikatea 2012 (or the most recent version).
Turn off all other layers, including Pre-human Kahikatea and Biodiversity Vegetation, so only kahikatea forest is visible on the map.
Type your address into the search box to find patches on your land. You can turn on a satellite photo or topographic map from the Base Map Gallery, to make it easier to find your stand.
Click on the stand you want to gather information on, and enter the Green Wheel rank values for the following sub-attributes into your Site Datasheet.

12) Size

13) Shape

14) Forest interior

24) Landscape matrix (nearby habitat)

25) Habitat links (terrestrial)

Kahikatea Green Wheel - vegetation biodiversity map screenshot

Kahikatea Green Wheel documents and tools

Landowner guide

First read the Guide to the Kahikatea Greenwheel. When you are ready to start, download a copy of the Site Datasheet and the Photopoint Datasheet.

My Kahikatea Green Wheel

Download the spreadsheet and enter data from plant and animal surveys, and from our Kahikatea forest map to generate your Kahikatea Green Wheel.

Download the spreadsheet
408 KB

Completed KGW example

See a real-life example for Turney Bush. Visit Turney Bush at Lake Rotopiko/Serpentine, south of Ōhaupō, State Highway 3, and see how the KGW values were applied.

Real life example for Turney Bush
166 KB

Animal monitoring

Download instructions on how to set up tracking tunnels to monitor native and pest animals.

Animal monitoring instructions
1.1 MB

Characteristic native plants and bird food plants

Get a list of plant species that are characteristic of healthy Waikato kahikatea fragments, and those that provide bird food. Use this list to help you restore your site.

Characteristic native plants and bird food
56 KB

For the botanists

Download the Botanists Quick Guide with simple instructions and a set of handy field datasheets, or read the full Technical guide for background information.

Download the KGW Spreadsheet. Tick the species in your site in the Native Plants and Unwanted Plants tabs. The spreadsheet will generate KGW scores from your list.

Kahikatea Green Wheel: Frequently asked questions

The Kahikatea Green Wheel has been developed specifically for Waikato kahikatea forest fragments. Many of the criteria will apply to other lowland sites, but not all. We advise against using the KGW to assess other forest types.
For wetlands, you can use the WETMAK Warrant of Fitness
For other forest types you could use FORMAK Site Assessment.
The KGW has been tailored specifically for Waikato kahikatea forest fragments. For instance, the plant attributes are based on species typical of a healthy lowland kahikatea forest. Using KGW for kahikatea fragments will give you much more relevant information than a generic forest assessment guide.
We recommend you do a separate KGW assessment for each individual stand, as they will likely have different scores for some attributes, such as size, shape, plant scores.
No. The KGW is focused on ecosystem values to help you restore or maintain the health of your kahikatea stand. Your site may have other values such as cultural, aesthetic, historic or recreational values.
No. You can still learn a lot about your site and its management needs by doing some of the attributes. For a full understanding of your site, we do recommend you try and complete as many of the attributes as you can.
The landowner guide provides details on how often you should repeat the assessment. Five-yearly is a good rough guide – try to be consistent.
Some of the attributes are best checked in winter, some in summer, so we recommend you collect that seasonal information first and then do your assessment of all the attributes together. Stick to the same time of year for the next assessment.
Most of the criteria can be applied by anyone familiar with the site. Some of the criteria require a person with good botanical skills, but you can choose to leave those criteria out of the assessment or do them less frequently. We expect a good botanist to be able to apply all the plant-based criteria in half a day for an average sized kahikatea fragment.
New Zealand has many distinct forest types, each with its own natural complement of species. A lot of familiar native plants are not typical of kahikatea forests, including upland species like hard beech, plants on volcanic soil like puriri, or estuarine plants like mangroves. The KGW gives higher scores to sites that have a “characteristic” suite of plant species, because they are typical of their forest type. You cannot improve your KGW score simply by planting any native species; the score is based only on species that are typical of a kahikatea stand (those found in over half of a set of healthy Waikato kahikatea stands).
There is a good guide to this in WETMAK (Wetland Monitoring and Assessment Kit) on the NZLT website, and a short video – look for WETMAK Photopoints on YouTube.
The attributes are linked into logical groups, but we have structured the guide so you can collect the data in a systematic way. For instance, we list the attributes you will assess outside the forest first, then the ones you will assess inside the forest, then the ones you will do back in the office from your own knowledge. However, you can fill in the site data sheet and KGW spreadsheet in any order you like.
The spreadsheet has been built to make it easy to use with links that will automatically fill in some of the fields for you. We have protected those cells so you can’t accidentally break the links.
You may have changed the row size which will distort the wheel. We suggest you download the wheel and start over. Take care to follow the warning notes in the spreadsheet.