New Zealand is on track for a predator-free 2050.

The area being worked on is rapidly growing in the country. Tom Agnew works for ZIP and oversees all of the projects.

“We would work on something like developing a new thermal AI camera that we put in the landscape to detect an incurring rat, or it could be developing a new drone that allows us to detect rabbits in a farmland landscape.”

ZIP differs from other organisations like the Department Of Conservation (DOC). DOC is tasked with a range of jobs, including biodiversity and a lot of the country's tourism, including a great walk or backcountry huts. What DOC doesn’t have a large budget for is the research and development of new tools and techniques, which is where ZIP stands out.

“A group of people who all still work for ZIP broke off from DOC, they had a small pool of funding and were basically tasked to go out and find out if we wanted to eradicate possum rats and stoats from the mainland in New Zealand, how would we do it?”

The team started with a small field trial site in the Malbrough Sounds, where they initially removed possums, rats, and stoats from that area using aerial toxins. then tried different methods in which they could stop animals from entering the control area. Now ZIP has scaled up to a much bigger area.

Tom is very excited for the future, with predator-free 2050 edging ever closer.

“I think we’re doing really well, we've gone through an interesting phase at the start of the movement but now we've been developing the tools and techniques to get the job done. We’ve scaled up for a forty-hectare peninsula to running projects that are hundreds of thousands of hectares and holding them free of pest species”

Tom thinks some more work needs to be done but New Zealand is definitely on the right track for a predator-free 2050.