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Over The HorizonBotanising in the CooksIncluded amongst researchers from Cambridge, Edinburgh and Guam on a two-month expedition to the northern Cook Islands is New Zealand taxonomist Bill Sykes. The group is examining past patterns of change in the atolls and surveying present resource use. They will develop conservation plans for the Cook Islands government. There are six islands in the Northern Cooks, most of them coral reefs and narrow islands (motus) of coral sand surrounding a lagoon. They have a very specialised and fragile structure, which is significant because of its value as a recorder of past climate and environmental change. Some of them are sparsely populated, and will enable researchers to carry out baseline surveys of the area to reveal the extent of human impact on the ecosystem. Sykes is one of New Zealand's leading plant scientists, and an expert on plants of the South Pacific. He has previously published ecological and taxonomic studies of Tonga, Niue, the Kermadecs and the Southern Cook Islands. He currently hopes to produce a Flora of the Cook Islands, listing and describing all the plants found there. With the Northern Cooks being coral atolls, he expects to find the flora poorer than in the high volcanic islands of the Southern Cooks, with many plants absent, but also that he'll find hardy local species adapted to drought, salt and wind. |
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