Pest plants and animals, seriously threaten our natural environment and agricultural industry. Controlling these pests is an important part of protecting the region's natural environment and the productive capacity of land, contributing to a high quality environment and a prosperous and viable region.

	Possum

Greater Wellington has prepared a Regional Pest Management Strategy under the Biosecurity Act, which identifies pests and sets out how they will be controlled.

Most pest control is now the responsibility of landowners. However, Greater Wellington's Biosecurity department is responsible for controlling some pests identified in the strategy. These include a number of pest plants and possums in Key Native Ecosystems, rabbits in some areas, rooks and nuisance magpies. Greater Wellington also supplies information and gives assistance to landowners to help them with pest control.

Find out more about the control of pest animals and pest plants.

	Climbing spindleberry

Monitoring and investigations are an important part of Greater Wellington's pest control work.

Monitoring provides an indication of the state of the environment, and is a particularly useful tool which enables Greater Wellington to make decisions regarding the timing and frequency of pest control operations and the performance of pest control operations.

Monitoring can be broken into two main categories outcome monitoring and performance monitoring.

Outcome monitoring is a long-term approach, looking at such things as changes in the health of native vegetation. Performance monitoring measures the actual and immediate performance of any pest control operation. These measures may be used to make payments to contractors.

Greater Wellington's pest control work is backed by research and development. We ensure our pest control practices are sustainable through ongoing assessment, analysis and trials. We also look at developing new sustainable pest control techniques for the future.

Biosecurity officers can be contacted in Wellington 04 526 4133 or
Wairarapa 06 378 2484.

You can also email pest.plants@gw.govt.nz or pest.animals@gw.govt.nz.