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Dr Shane Wright (Te Āti Hau, Tūwharetoa) is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Biological Sciences at The University of Auckland. The idea for this research project started to form in his twenties, when he was travelling the world as a gofer for science teams and noticed how plant diversity changed with altitude.
 

Without Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga, New Zealand research on evolution hailed as a breakthrough by the world’s leading news media would never have happened. LIKE MANY A scientific race, it came down to the wire. When Dr Shane Wright, at the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Auckland, published new findings on the speed of evolution in top scientific journal, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, a rival team from Florida followed home just three weeks behind.

Now largely surrounded by downtown Napier, Te Whanganui-a-Orotū (the Ahuriri Estuary), has seen decades of agricultural, industrial, and urban activity that have transformed this once pristine cultural and food resource into a sink for environmental contaminants. Pushing the lagoon floor up two metres, the region’s 1931 earthquake only added to reclamation and pollution of food stocks.