Canterbury Museum’s Cor Vink talks spiders in Nina Valley

The 2014 EcoBlitz was a great event held at the Boyle River and Nina Valley near Lewis Pass earlier this year. The event involved over 170 high school students (from 21 schools), 30 teachers, 24 Lincoln University students and 50 biologists. The attendees spent a weekend finding and cataloguing the diversity of the area with workshops on monitoring and talks on relevant concepts thrown in. It was a logistical triumph and a fantastic coming together of researchers and students. The event has been recognised at last night’s New Zealand Green Ribbon Awards, held in the Banquet Hall of the Beehive in Wellington, where it won the award for Communication and Education (against 24 other projects) as well as the Supreme Award for best overall (blitzing the 113 other projects)! This is a great thank you to organisers Tim Kelly, Melissa Brown (Hurunui College) and Tim Curran, Cathy Mountier, and Jon Sullivan (Ecology, Lincoln University),  Sarah Ensor, Brian Taylor, Danny Kimber (Department of Conservation), Sonny Whitelaw (Hurunui District Council), Steven Attwood (Convergence PR) and Wendy Davis (Boyle River Outdoor Education Centre).