Transcending boundaries: transitioning toward integrated estuary management in Aotearoa New Zealand

Abstract

encouraging broad collab-oration and bridging institutional divides and research disciplines. A cross-challenge initiative (Ki uta ki tai) 2 between Sustainable Seas, Our Land Our Water, 3 the Ministry for the Environment and multiple iwi partners is a New Zealand fi rst. The project was speci fi cally designed to improve linkages between freshwater and estuarine management approaches. It aims to identify stress-response relationships that will be integral to limit-setting and has shown that estuaries do not always respond to stressors in the same manner. Estuaries may not respond to management actions immediately either, with recent research identifying time lags in ecological health in connected freshwater and estuarine ecosystems across Aotearoa (Berthelsen et al. 2020). These studies suggest that national-scale limit setting may fail to reverse degradation in certain estuaries, or parts of estuaries, without more nuanced tools and guidance.