The facts on forest fragments
Forest Fragment Management Series
About the document
When people arrived in the Waikato it was almost entirely covered by a few massive tracts of native forest. Today, following land clearance, native forest covers 20 per cent of the region. It has been fragmented into over 8100 individual forest patches, separated by pasture, plantation forestry, orchards or urban areas.
Although 95 per cent of all the region’s native forest vegetation remains within blocks bigger than 25 ha, the vast majority of the individual patches (92 per cent of them) are small fragments less than 25 hectares.