Tasman region
Tasman District is bounded by Tasman Bay and Golden Bay on its seaward side and the Victoria Range and Spenser Mountains in the south. Tasman includes three national parks: Abel Tasman National Park, Nelson Lakes National Park and Kahurangi National Park. The region is home to a wide variety of landscapes from the sand dunes of Farewell Spit to extensive cave networks around Mount Owen and Mount Arthur and has some of the clearest water ever measured within Blue Lake and Te Waikoropupū Springs.
Estuaries in Tasman are valued for recreation, including kayaking, water-skiing, swimming, walking, horse-riding, bird-watching, as well as harvesting of cockles and fish. Several estuaries in Tasman are considered nationally important for coastal birds – particularly Farewell Spit, Motueka River Delta and Sandspit and Waimea estuary.
The main pressures on estuaries in Tasman are sedimentation, vehicles damaging habitats, habitat loss through sea level rise, and ecological change through sea temperature and acidity change.
Tasman’s estuaries have suffered historic saltmarsh loss through reclamation - 30% loss across the district since 1900. Moutere and Ruataniwha estuaries have suffered the largest loss at 47% and 40% respectively. On average about two-thirds of the natural vegetated buffer margin around estuaries has been developed into pasture, residential and forestry land use.
Tasman District Council monitors six estuaries from Waimea in the east to Whanganui in the west. The purpose of this monitoring is to understand their condition and characterise and track changes in their ecological health. The Whanganui Inlet is the least modified monitored estuary with only 17% of the margin in pasture.
Half of all estuaries in Tasman and Golden Bays are excessively muddy (greater than 10% of the estuary area filled with soft muds). The Waimea estuary is most affected at 47% soft mud (>50% mud content), with Waitapu and Motupipi at approximately 25%. Despite moderate to high nutrient loads to a few of Tasman’s estuaries (Waimea and Motupipi in particular) they have low to moderate nutrient enrichment (which manifests in nuisance algal growth and low oxygen concentrations). This is due to the relatively high level of flushing.
