Through understanding how the health and abundance of plant and animal species changes across time according to the type and scale of land-based activities (for example pastoral grazing, horticulture, and forestry), landowners can better manage these activities and minimise their impact on te taiao/the environment.
Manaaki Whenua offers several specialist services to understand the biodiversity of your whenua, such as rongoā mapping to outline the potential health-promoting properties of plants.
Rongoā practitioners recognise that the health-promoting potency of plants varies according to where they are growing on the whenua. Mātauranga Māori tells us that this is because of the physical properties of the taiao, like soil types, climate and position of plants in relation to other plants.
Many plants and mushrooms contain compounds in their leaves, roots, bark, seeds, flowers or fruiting bodies with beneficial or healing properties. These compounds are called ‘bioactive’ because they have effects on biological functions in our bodies, such as metabolism and immunity.
If you are looking to use or develop products based on the health-giving properties of your plants, we can provide chemical analysis that measures their bioactive content.
This information can help you understand where the most bioactive plants are located on your whenua
to ensure that you produce the most potent products. Knowledge can help guide your product development and application, giving you confidence about what chemicals are in your plants and ultimately your product or rongoā rākau/plant medicine.
This involves working with you to determine where and how to take samples from your whenua. This will involve an initial kōrero to discuss the best sampling design so we can confirm the number of samples that need to be tested. We have the laboratory equipment to identify the chemical composition of your samples with sensitive analytical equipment (e.g., chromatography and mass spectrometry).
If you know the compounds you are interested in, we can measure their concentration. If you don’t know the compounds in your plants but believe you might have something worth pursuing; we can also discuss this. These methods will be specifically developed with each client based on the sample type, compounds of interest, and budget.
Services we commonly offer include:
- Antioxidant test. Antioxidants are compounds that protect cells from damage and inflammation.
- Antimicrobial test. Antimicrobials are compounds that kill microbes or stop their growth.
- Deliver the data and an interpretation of the data and results as a written report, including recommendations.
- If you need help identifying the types of plants on your whenua, we can visit you.
- For very large areas we have LiDAR remote sensing technology to help map the different plant types in your ngāhere.
