Breadcrumbs

A good week for a top scientist

21 September 2016

Bruce Clarkson

Professor Bruce Clarkson, winner of the Royal Society's Charles Fleming Award for environmental achievement.

The University of Waikato’s Professor Bruce Clarkson has been awarded the Charles Fleming Award for Environmental Achievement by the Royal Society of New Zealand.

It’s been a good month for the Deputy Vice-Chancellor Research who learned last week that he had also received more than $2.8 million Endeavour funding from the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Enterprise to lead a project People, Cities and Nature: Restoring indigenous nature in urban environments. 

The Charles Fleming Award honours those who have achieved distinction in the protection, maintenance, management, improvement or understanding of the environment, in particular the sustainable management of the New Zealand environment. The award is made every three years to an individual and consists of a medal and a cash grant of $2000.

Early in his career, Professor Clarkson studied New Zealand’s volcanoes and became something of an expert in volcanic succession, monitoring how lands recover after all flora and fauna have been wiped out.  He earned international recognition for his research and was invited by institutions all over the world to talk about patterns and processes in vegetation, “and then later in my career I became more and more interested in urban sites and green spaces and bringing nature back to the city”. And that too has earned him international accolades. 

In New Zealand Professor Clarkson has had to deal with some high-profile environmental issues, regularly presenting evidence to the Environment Court, and in Hamilton he led what was sometimes a difficult battle with some city councillors to expand the restoration of the 60-hectare Waiwhakareke Natural Heritage Park in the city ‒ New Zealand’s largest inland restoration project.

Over the years Bruce has secured government funding for eight programmes, including New Zealand’s first-ever programme that focused on restoration of indigenous ecosystems in urban environments. He set up the University of Waikato’s Environmental Research Institute in 2010 and up until recently he was interim director the Biological Heritage National Science Challenge.

Professor Clarkson co-founded the Waikato and Rotorua botanical societies, and has served on numerous committees and trust boards. “What I enjoy is increasing the public’s appreciation and understanding of the value of indigenous natural heritage, and I enjoy doing research where you can see positive results, when you know what you’ve done, or helped to do, will have long-lasting good effects.”

The Charles Fleming Award requires Professor Clarkson to complete an all-expenses paid public lecture tour, to visit selected Royal Society branches, and he’s looking forward to the tour. “Partly because I’ll be visiting some of the cities involved in the Endeavour-funded project.” 

For People, Cities and Nature, Professor Clarkson has brought together a cross-disciplinary team of young researchers from institutions around the country to be part of the four-year project that will look at the best methods to bring nature, that’s plants, native birds and animals, back into urban areas. The researchers “a vigorous, highly productive group of urban ecologists” come from Waikato, Victoria and Otago universities and Landcare Research.

“They’re all specialists in different areas who’ll be investigating ways to improve or manipulate habitats to increase populations of native plants, birds and other animals.”

The cities on board are Hamilton, New Plymouth, Tauranga, Napier, Wellington, Nelson and Dunedin, plus the Waikato and Hawke’s Bay regional councils and Zealandia in Karori, Wellington.