NZ’s Father of Forest Typing Has Died
John Nicholls passed away last Thursday morning at a rest home in Rotorua. He was 89. John was the senior forest ecologist at FRI in Rotorua, and to a large extent was the father of forest typing in New Zealand. John was posted to FRI in 1952, and almost immediately started with the National Forest Survey.
John became the most knowledgeable person in New Zealand on the description and typing of our indigenous forests and his forest type maps of NZ indigenous forests are still in wide use today. Ironically his work has been well used by the Department of Conservation recently as the basis for identifying many of the forest types for the national Ecosystem Optimisation Project.
John Nicholls (left) receiving his Rotorua Botanical Society life membership award in 2008 from then president John Hobbs (right)
He was also largely responsible for many of the Ecological Areas now administered by DOC that were created in 1970s and 80s on the basis of the representative examples of forest types that he identified. Without this work many of the areas would have been logged and would not exist in their present form now. His achievements are well summed up by Tony Beveridge in the book “Characters of FRI” - “John’s work on identifying a nationwide system of ecological areas must be numbered as one of the genuinely heroic, but unsung, research efforts of the 1970s and ’80s. Not only did he play a major role in developing the philosophy for representative natural areas in New Zealand, but he, almost single-handedly, identified, mapped, described, and defended before a high-powered multi-disciplinary committee, close to 150 ecological areas totalling over 300,000 ha. The memorial to his efforts lies not in papers in science journals, but in enduring native forest landscapes.” Tony goes on to say that “it is unlikely that John’s encyclopaedic knowledge of New Zealand native forest composition and species distribution on a national scale will ever again be known to a single person.”
John was awarded The New Zealand Order of Merit (MNZM) in 2004 for services to ecology and forest research. He was a life member of the New Zealand Ecological Society and Rotorua Botanical Society. John was still contributing to others research on forest ecology until the recent past when ill health meant his final retirement. John’s funeral was held in Rotorua this past Saturday and was well attended by colleagues and friends from FRI and Landcare Research.
Posted: 23/08/2010