Matt Mcglone

• PhD
• Research Associate at Manaaki Whenua - Landcare Research

We present data on sexual systems and associated traits in the New Zealand angiosperm flora and discuss reasons for the anomalously high levels of gender dimorphism in the flora, and the low levels of monoecy in woody species. Along with Hawai'i and New Caledonia, New Zealand has exceptionally high levels of gender dimorphism (19.5% of angiosperm s...

Eco-evolutionary priority effects, in which early arriving taxa pre-empt environmental niches and evolve to exclude or marginalise later arriving taxa, have been claimed to have influenced current vegetation communities in New Zealand. We here critically assess this claim. An examination of the entire New Zealand conifer and angiosperm flora shows...

Background: Over 80% of New Zealand’s indigenous forests are in public ownership with logging prohibited, and logging of private indigenous forests is restricted to sustainable harvesting only. Such limitations are highly unusual globally and were imposed only in the last few decades of the 20th century. Previously, the national goal had been indig...

Indigenous plant naming systems and systematic botanical nomenclature involve different methodologies that result in different knowledge systems. Botanical nomenclature provides a single, universal name for a plant based on its taxonomic and evolutionary relationships. Indigenous classifications allow ready identification of plants for particular c...

Our paper about the impacts of the Laschamps Geomagnetic Excursion 42,000 years ago has provoked considerable scientific and public interest, particularly in the so-called Adams Event associated with the initial transition of the magnetic poles. Although we welcome the opportunity to discuss our new ideas, Hawks’ assertions of misrepresentation are...

Our study on the exact timing and the potential climatic, environmental, and evolutionary consequences of the Laschamps Geomagnetic Excursion has generated the hypothesis that geomagnetism represents an unrecognized driver in environmental and evolutionary change. It is important for this hypothesis to be tested with new data, and encouragingly, no...

Phylogenetic diversity analyses were used to interpret the timing and assembly of vegetation communities in temperate New Zealand. A data set comprising 1638 permanent vegetation plots provided plant-distributional data, and a plastid rbcL phylogenetic tree provided phylogenetic metrics. Mean crown age, standardized effect size of mean pairwise dis...

Supplementary material for: Genetic variation reveals broad-scale biogeographic patterns and challenges species’ classification in the Kunzea ericoides (kānuka; Myrtaceae) complex from New Zealand

Kunzea (kānuka) in New Zealand comprises ten endemic species following a recent taxonomic revision, several of which are abundant, widespread and ecologically important as early successional colonisers. The species are difficult to recognise in the field in many areas, some plants appear intermediate between species and it has been argued hybrids a...

Reversing the field Do terrestrial geomagnetic field reversals have an effect on Earth's climate? Cooper et al. created a precisely dated radiocarbon record around the time of the Laschamps geomagnetic reversal about 41,000 years ago from the rings of New Zealand swamp kauri trees. This record reveals a substantial increase in the carbon-14 content...

Supplementary Material for 'A global environmental crisis 42,000 years ago' Geological archives record multiple reversals of Earth’s magnetic poles, but the global impacts of these events, if any, remain unclear. Uncertain radiocarbon calibration has limited investigation of the potential effects of the last major magnetic inversion, known as the...

The New Zealand flora has a high proportion of endemic species but has been invaded by almost the same number of non-native plant species. To support management of invasive plant species, we provide an updated inventory of New Zealand’s naturalised flora and compare it with the native flora to identify key taxonomic and functional distinctions. We...

It is argued that the greater use of te reo Māori and ta re Moriori languages for naming new taxa in the flora of Aotearoa / New Zealand supports the aspirations of Māori and Te Tiriti o Waitangi. However, using these indigenous languages in botanical nomenclature is more complex than a simplistic 'more is better', and we identify a number of issue...

Lineage through time plots (LTTs) are often used to explore past patterns of lineage diversification and community assembly. However, as they are based solely on extant species their ability to accurately depict past events can be questioned. Here, simulation models based on neutral processes are used to explore immigration and extinction scenarios...

Island ecosystems can be severely affected by climate change as they provide limited opportunities for species to track their habitat. Studying the population dynamics of keystone species from these ecosystems can shed a light on climate – ecosystem interactions. Southern beeches are such keystone species in New Zealand with beech forests constitut...

1. There is a global need for observation systems that deliver regular, timely data on state and trends in biodiversity, but few have been implemented, and fewer still at national scales. We describe the implementation of measurement of Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs) on an 8 km × 8 km grid throughout New Zealand, with multiple components o...

Oceanic islands remained free of humans until relatively recent times. On contact, humans encountered pristine environments with unique ecosystems and species highly vulnerable to novel impacts. In the course of rendering an island habitable, the new settlers transformed it through fire, deforestation, hunting and introduction of pests and weeds. T...

For tens of millions of years the ratite moa (Aves: Dinornithiformes) were the largest herbivores in New Zealand’s terrestrial ecosystems. In occupying this ecological niche for such a long time, moa undoubtedly had a strong influence on the evolution of New Zealand’s flora and played important functional roles within ecosystems. The extinction of...

Campbell Island, which is 600 km south of New Zealand, has the southernmost tree line in this ocean sector. Directly under the maximum of the westerlies, the island is sensitive to changes in wind strength and direction. Pollen records from three peat cores spanning the tree line ecotone provide a 17,000-year history of vegetation change, temperatu...

A colonisation history for 411 extant genera and 477 lineages of the vascular flora of New Zealand was constructed using the plastid rbcL gene. Molecular clock crown ages suggest that the Eocene-Oligocene transition extinction at 33.9 Ma was critical to the development of the extant flora as few lineages, mostly ferns and conifers, predate this eve...

New Zealand's unique biodiversity is the product of at least 55 million years of geographic isolation, supplemented by persistent transoceanic migration. Palaeontological and genetic evidence suggest most New Zealand avifauna has colonized from Australia. We synthesize evolutionary genetic studies to show a previously unrecognized clustering of div...

The New Zealand subantarctic islands of Auckland and Campbell, situated between the subtropical front and the Antarctic Convergence in the Pacific sector of the Southern Ocean, provide valuable terrestrial records from a globally important climatic region. Whilst the islands show clear evidence of past glaciation, the timing and mechanisms behind P...

Central Otago is one of the driest parts of New Zealand, and much of the natural vegetation of the region was lost to fires following human settlement in the 13th Century AD. Plant macrofossil and pollen records have provided detailed insights into the vegetation communities that existed in Central Otago’s lowlands at the time of human settlement,...

Impacts of global climate change on terrestrial ecosystems are imperfectly constrained by ecosystem models and direct observations. Pervasive ecosystem transformations occurred in response to warming and associated climatic changes during the last glacial-to-interglacial transition, which was comparable in magnitude to warming projected for the nex...

Fire is a major threat to remnant native woody vegetation in dry, lowland New Zealand. This is because the woody flora lacks specific adaptations to survive fire, and seedling regeneration is constrained by summer drought, limited native seed rain and intense competition from non-native grasses that are often favoured by fire. In December 2000, a f...

The New Zealand subantarctic islands of Auckland and Campbell, situated between the Subtropical Front and the Antarctic Convergence in the Pacific sector of the Southern Ocean, provide valuable terrestrial records from a globally-important climatic region. Whilst the islands show clear evidence of past glaciation, the timing and mechanisms behind P...

Canterbury’s gravelly outwash plains offer few of the natural deposits in which floral remains are typically preserved and hence represent a significant geographical gap in our knowledge about New Zealand’s pre-settlement terrestrial ecosystems and their response to anthropogenic activities. We contribute new insights into the poorly known Holocene...

Anthropogenic activity is now recognised as having profoundly and permanently altered the Earth system, suggesting we have entered a human-dominated geological epoch, the ‘Anthropocene’. To formally define the onset of the Anthropocene, a synchronous global signature within geological-forming materials is required. Here we report a series of precis...

The New Zealand conifers (20 species of trees and shrubs in the Araucariaceae, Podocarpaceae, and Cupressaceae) are often regarded as ancient Gondwanan elements, but mostly originated much later. Often thought of as tall trees of humid, warm forests, they are present throughout in alpine shrublands, tree lines, bogs, swamps, and in dry, frost-prone...

Categorical analysis of neo- and palaeo-endemism (CANAPE), phylogenetic diversity (PD) and phylogenetic weighted endemism (PWE) were used to explore patterns of diversity, endemism and biogeography in the indigenous vascular flora of the New Zealand archipelago. Distributional data comprising 213 142 records for 436 genera and 2187 species and a ph...

We present new pollen-temperature reconstructions for the Last Interglacial from central North Island, New Zealand using partial least squares regression (PLS) and modern analogue technique applied with the New Zealand pre-deforestation calibration pollen dataset. The pollen-bearing organic sequence includes numerous millimetre- to decimetre- thick...

Aim Immigrant floras often have distinctive traits, well suited to the host region but absent from the autochthonous flora. An example is serotiny in the New Zealand ( NZ ) small tree, Leptospermum scoparium (Myrtaceae) belonging to a strongly fire‐adapted Australian clade. Serotiny in L. scoparium has been attributed either to strong selection by...

Occupying about 14 % of the world's surface, the Southern Ocean plays a fundamental role in ocean and atmosphere circulation, carbon cycling and Antarctic ice-sheet dynamics. Unfortunately, high interannual variability and a dearth of instrumental observations before the 1950s limits our understanding of how marine–atmosphere–ice domains interact o...

The biotic- and ecological-changes of the New Zealand Quaternary unfolded against a background of mountain-building, marine transgression and volcanism—a legacy of the mid-Tertiary that continued unabated through the Plio-Pleistocene. In the stable, warm northern regions much of the old Tertiary biota survives; in the mountainous, glaciated south,...

This chapter examines likely future changes in New Zealand over the intermediate (100 year) and a longer term (5000 year) futures. The first section examines the underlying processes and concludes that in the longer term future, tectonic and volcanic processes are likely to have a stronger impact on New Zealand, as a landmass, than foreseeable futu...

Occupying 14% of the world’s surface, the Southern Ocean plays a fundamental role in global climate, ocean circulation, carbon cycling and Antarctic ice-sheet stability. Unfortunately, high interannual variability and a dearth of instrumental observations before the 1950s limits our understanding of how marine-atmosphere-ice domains interact on mul...

If we are to make meaningful and measurable progress in restoring New Zealand's biological heritage by 2050, a range of fundamental issues need to be addressed. These relate not just to restoration science but also to building ecosystem resilience in the wider socio-economic and cultural context within which restoration occurs.

The pre-clearance New Zealand lowlands were largely in complex, liana-rich, multi-layered conifer–angiosperm forest. Here it is designated oceanic temperate forest (OTF), its climatic envelope is defined, global distribution is assessed and origin is reviewed. Often described as Gondwanan or relic, tree genera characteristic of the OTF are more lik...

Aim Puzzling features of plants are sometimes explained as legacies of co‐evolution with extinct herbivores. One example is the convergent evolution of a small‐leaved, twiggy ‘divaricate’ form in > 50 woody species in New Zealand. This growth form was first interpreted as a response to the Plio‐Pleistocene onset of frosty, droughty environments, bu...

The Southern Ocean plays a significant role in driving global climate–ocean–carbon dynamics. Unfortunately, a relative dearth of datasets across the region limits our ability to understand past and future mechanisms of change. Here we report a new dataset from the south-west Pacific: radiocarbon-dated subfossil tree stumps (Dracophyllum) eroding ou...

Premise of the study: In fire-prone ecosystems, variation in bark thickness among species and communities has been explained by fire frequency; thick bark is necessary to protect cambium from lethal temperatures. Elsewhere this investment is deemed unnecessary, and thin bark is thought to prevail. However, in rain forest ecosystems where fire is r...

Alien plants are a pervasive environmental problem, particularly on islands where they can rapidly transform unique indigenous ecosystems. However, often it is difficult to confidently determine if a species is native or alien, especially if establishment occurred before historical records. This can present a management challenge: for example, shou...

The relative importance of people and climate in shaping prehistoric fire regimes is debated around the world, and this discussion has helped inform our understanding of past and present ecosystem dynamics. Evidence for extensive anthropogenic burning of temperate closed-canopy forests prior to European settlement is geographically variable, and th...

Results from terrestrial and marine palaeoclimate proxies are integrated to reconstruct palaeoclimate variations in New Zealand from the Last Interglacial to the global Last Glacial Maximum (gLGM). By combining data from 21 speleothems we have constructed composite O–C stable isotope sequences from 0 to 88.5 ka BP and from 107.8 to 128.2 ka BP. The...

In two recent papers in this journal a leading proponent of panbiogeography, Michael Heads, has continued his critique of long-distance dispersal and molecular clocks, and promotion of alternative geological and evolutionary ideas. An axiomatic rejection of long-distance dispersal, on the grounds that it has no explanatory power, informs these crit...

Human-caused forest transitions are documented worldwide, especially during periods when land use by dense agriculturally-based populations intensified. However, the rate at which prehistoric human activities led to permanent deforestation is poorly resolved. In the South Island, New Zealand, the arrival of Polynesians c. 750 years ago resulted in...

We challenge the concept that intermediate woody species heights are suboptimal.•There is no bimodality in woody species heights at a regional flora scale.•Claims that there is a deficit in 8–10 m high species are incorrect.•Global plant trait databases under-represent shrubs and over-represent forests.

QuestionRare and threatened species are a common focus of natural area protection, but selecting sites to protect them must be balanced against other conservation objectives. Using a series of wetlands as a case study, we ask: (i) will protecting sites based on species rarity capture all critical community types; (ii) do rare plant species occur in...

Abstract A robust understanding of Antarctic Ice Sheet deglacial history since the Last Glacial Maximum is important in order to constrain ice sheet and glacial-isostatic adjustment models, and to explore the forcing mechanisms responsible for ice sheet retreat. Such understanding can be derived from a broad range of geological and glaciological da...

A robust understanding of Antarctic Ice Sheet deglacial history since the Last Glacial Maximum is important in order to constrain ice sheet and glacial-isostatic adjustment models, and to explore the forcing mechanisms responsible for ice sheet retreat. Such understanding can be derived from a broad range of geological and glaciological datasets an...

This paper is the maritime and sub–Antarctic contribution to the Scientific Committee for Antarctic Research (SCAR) Past Antarctic Ice Sheet Dynamics (PAIS) community Antarctic Ice Sheet reconstruction. The overarching aim for all sectors of Antarctica was to reconstruct the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) ice sheet extent and thickness, and map the sub...

Campbell Island, an isolated island 600 km south of New Zealand mainland (52°S, 169°E) is oceanic (Conrad Index of Continentality = -5) with small differences between mean summer and winter temperatures. Previous work established the unexpected result that a mean annual climate warming of c. 0.6°C since the 1940's has not led to upward movement of...

Fire is a complex physical and ecological process and one that has dramatically affected New Zealand's landscapes and ecosystems in the post-settlement era. Prior to human settlement in the late 13th century, the Holocene palaeoenvironmental record suggests that fire frequencies were low across most of New Zealand, with the notable exception of som...

Climate refugia, locations where taxa survive periods of regionally adverse climate, are thought to be critical for maintaining biodiversity through the glacial–interglacial climate changes of the Quaternary. A critical research need is to better integrate and reconcile the three major lines of evidence used to infer the existence of past refugia –...

Aim Southern temperate tree lines are found at low elevations compared with their Northern Hemisphere counterparts. They are also regarded as forming at warm temperatures, which has been attributed to taxon‐specific limitations. Using New Zealand tree lines as an example, we assess whether these tree lines are anomalously warm compared with the glo...

Ongoing changes in disturbance regimes are predicted to cause acute changes in ecosystem structure and function in the coming decades, but many aspects of these predictions are uncertain. A key challenge is to improve the predictability of postdisturbance biogeochemical trajectories at the ecosystem level. Ecosystem ecologists and paleoecologists h...

Aim Anthropogenic fires caused New Zealand's temperate rain forests to decline rapidly from 80% to 50% cover after Polynesian arrival. In contrast, Australian temperate rain forests have remained stable in spite of a longer history of fire and human occupation. We evaluate whether New Zealand's conifer‐dominated forests declined because they lack f...

Ecosystems change between arbuscular mycorrhizal and ectomycorrhizal vegetation dominance over anthropological and geological time scales, yet consequences for ecosystem function are unclear. We review four hypotheses for the effect of mycorrhizal status on ecosystem function. Specifically, that differences between ectomycorrhizal and arbuscular my...

Less than 4% of the non-bamboo grasses worldwide abscise old leaves, whereas some 18% of New Zealand native grasses do so. Retention of dead or senescing leaves within grass canopies reduces biomass production and encourages fire but also protects against mammalian herbivory. Recently it has been argued that elevated rates of leaf abscission in New...

In New Zealand, there are treelines of two main forms: abrupt southern beech treelines and gradual conifer-broadleaved treelines. At similar latitudes, abrupt treelines form at higher elevation than gradual treelines, but it is unclear whether this difference is also reflected in the climatic conditions experienced at the contrasting treeline ecoto...

The increased incidence of large fires around much of the world in recent decades raises questions about human and non-human drivers of fire and the likelihood of increased fire activity in the future. The purpose of this paper is to outline a conceptual framework for examining where human-set fires and feedbacks are likely to be most pronounced in...

The Kawakawa/Oruanui tephra (KOT) is a key chronostratigraphic marker in terrestrial and marine deposits of the New Zealand (NZ) sector of the southwest Pacific. Erupted early during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), the wide distribution of the KOT enables inter-regional alignment of proxy records and facilitates comparison between NZ climatic varia...

Understanding the evolutionary history and biogeography of the New Zealand alpine flora has been impeded by the lack of an integrated model of geomorphology and climate events during the Late Miocene, Pliocene and Pleistocene. A new geobiological model is presented that integrates rock uplift age, rate of uplift and the resulting summit elevations...

Aim Despite small and transient populations, early Māori transformed large areas of New Zealand's forest landscapes. We sought to isolate the biophysical predictors that explain forest loss in the pre-historic (i.e. pre-European) period in New Zealand. Location New Zealand. Methods We used resampled boosted regression trees to isolate the key predi...

New Zealand treeline species have low frost tolerance compared to their northern hemisphere counterparts, and appear susceptible to out-of-season frosts. However, foliage from high altitude trees is rarely directly measured. This study compares seasonal frost tolerance of mature treeline trees with local temperatures to assess whether frost affects...

At the time of Māori settlement, ca. 750 years ago, New Zealand's ecosystems experienced catastrophic change, including the introduction of fire to ignition‐limited ecosystems and the resulting widespread loss of forest. While high‐resolution sediment‐charcoal analyses suggest this forest loss was rapid, Māori populations were small and transient d...

In the past 100,000 years, many of the largest animals on Earth became extinct. The reasons for these megafaunal extinctions remain contentious ( 1 , 2 ). In 1967, Martin suggested that within a few hundred years of their arrival, fast-moving bands of hunters eliminated the big game by overkill ( 3 ). Similarly, Flannery claimed in the 1990s that t...

Human hunting was responsible for the extinction of large mammal species in tropical Australia.

Environmental change in the temperate forested regions Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in the resolution, quality and diversity of environmental records from the Quaternary and even more spectacular improvements in databases of global or regional reach, analysis and display of results. Scientific institutes and researchers are concentrat...

Pollen analysts often study pollen grains that cannot be easily attributed to a particular taxon. As a consequence, a pollen type may be recorded under various names, leading to uncertainty in their interpretation by others. This limits the usefulness of pollen data for inclusion in databases or meta-analyses. To minimize any such ambiguity, we bri...

Past seasonality changes are often poorly represented by Quaternary proxies because one season, or one factor, dominates the reconstructed signal. During the early Holocene in New Zealand, mean annual temperatures were at least 1.5°C warmer than present. However, treelines were lower, suggesting summers were cooler. Here we use a forest ecosystem p...

New Zealand's climate is changing. Mean annual temperatures have warmed by almost 1°C (with the most warming in winter) since AD 1900, but with substantial year-to-year fluctuations. Frost frequency has declined through most of the country since the middle of the 20th century, although only a small net warming (c. 0.3°C) has occurred. This study us...

The warming trend over the last century in the northern hemisphere (NH) was interrupted by cooling from ad 1940 to 1975, a period during which the southern hemisphere experienced pronounced warming. The cause of these departures from steady warming at multidecadal timescales are unclear; the prevailing explanation is that they are driven by non-uni...

Humans have altered natural patterns of fire for millennia, but the impact of human-set fires is thought to have been slight in wet closed-canopy forests. In the South Island of New Zealand, Polynesians (Māori), who arrived 700–800 calibrated years (cal y) ago, and then Europeans, who settled ∼150 cal y ago, used fire as a tool for forest clearance...

Over the past 18,000 years, sea surface temperatures for the Southern Ocean do not align with those of the adjacent, high-latitude landmasses. During the late glacial period, the ocean surface warmed rapidly to present-day temperatures, whereas the land warmed only slowly, as evidenced by the lagged response of forest and glaciers. However, in the...

Leaf lifespan varies widely among plant species, from a few weeks to >40 years. This variation is associated with differences in plant form and function, and the distribution of species along resource gradients. Longer leaf lifespans increase the residence time of nutrients and are one mechanism by which plants conserve nutrients; consequently, lea...