About

About the Trust

The Project is a programme of the Cook Islands Government: a) to collect and integrate scientific and traditional information on local plants and animals; and b) to preserve such information, and make it available to the general public.

The Natural Heritage Project was initiated by Sir Geoffrey Henry within his Prime Minister's Department in 1990. The Project moved into the Natural Heritage Trust when it was established in 1999 by an Act of Parliament.

We thank the many overseas scientific experts and the resident traditional knowledge experts for their generous support.

The primary funding for the Project and its database is from the Cook Islands Government. In addition, there has been essential funding from NZAID, SDC, Bishop Museum, PBIN, GEF, and UNDP. We thank these organisations for their generous support.

The Project has a permanent research staff of one.

About the Biodiversity Database

The collection of data and the development of the database on MS Access took more than a dozen years. The Bishop Museum (Honolulu), with support from PBIN, facilitated the programming of the database for the web and hosts the original website. It was launched on 8 March 2003, reprogrammed and radically redesigned on 1 May 2005, and further developed 1 October 2005.

The multimedia database is designed to integrate scientific and traditional information on all the plants and animals of the Cook Islands — native and non-native; terrestrial, marine, and freshwater. The database can use a range of criteria to display subsets of species for special interest groups.

The database lists around 4,300 species (as of July 2007), which included most of the species known to experts and recorded in publications. We estimate there are about 3,000 more species to be recorded.

About 2,600 species have images to aid identification. Textual information is growing (slowly).

By the Numbers

A snapshot of what the database currently holds. Click each section to expand.

Known data problems

In the database there are more than 100 fields of data for each species. Most of this information is displayed on the species page. When a particular field is empty this may or may not be indicated on the species page.

Where possible, question marks are used to indicate that particular information is incomplete or might be mistaken.

Sometimes a field for many species can contain data which has not been adequately checked and is not marked with a question mark. These areas are listed below:

1. Native range for insects.
2. Orthography of Māori names for Manihiki, Rakahanga, and Palmerston; and for the fishes of Rarotonga.

Acknowledgements

Foreword

I started researching the plants and animals of the Cook Islands in 1980 as a hobby while I was the Science Advisor to the Ministry of Education. This hobby continued through my two years as Director of the Environment Service from 1988 to 1990; and it became an occupation when Sir Geoffrey Henry established the Natural Heritage Project in 1990. The Natural Heritage Trust was formed by an Act of Parliament in 1999, and the Project moved into the Trust.

Undertaking such research in the absence of a community of biologists and scientific libraries would have been impossible without the continuous support of overseas specialists. Their academic and moral support made the scientific side of the Project possible. I am immensely grateful to them, regardless of whether we worked together for days on end in the field or they gave a sentence that solved an otherwise insoluble problem.

The Project transformed from natural science into natural heritage as residents told me their names for and uses of local plants and animals. I am forever grateful to them for their encouragement and their willingness to share their traditional knowledge with a delving foreigner. I can only hope I have not misrepresented your knowledge when I recorded it in English with a 'western' scientific bias.

Some overseas and local experts made a major effort to contribute information to the Natural Heritage Project and I could not resist putting their names in bold type.

A special thanks to my late wife, Kathy McCormack for her support of my endless hobby, and to my ex-partner, Judith Kunzle for her contribution to the Natural Heritage Project as an artist and fellow researcher.

Meitaki maʻata.

Gerald McCormack, July 2003

Administrative Support

The Cook Islands Natural Heritage Project is the only programme of its kind in the South Pacific. It was made possible when the Prime Minister, Sir Geoffrey Henry, offered his support to the idea of recording and preserving traditional and scientific knowledge of all Cook Islands plants and animals. I thank Sir Geoffrey and his cabinet for supporting the programme thoughout the 1990s, culminating in the Natural Heritage Trust Act of 1999. Since that time I am indebted to the Chairman of the Trust, Lionel Browne and his Board (Mark Brown, Maria Cowan, Nga Mataio, Ken Matheson, Janice Siulepa, Io Tuakeu-Lindsay, and Vaitoti Tupa). From the days before the programme was formalised I would like to give a special thanks to Tuingariki Short (former Secretary of Education), Cecilia Short (former Senior Curriculum Officer), Tony Utanga (former Secretary of Internal Affairs), Neva Wendt (Education Officer, SPREP), and Diane Goodwillie (Canada Fund) for their support and encouragement. During the 1990s a special thanks to Tere Tangiiti (then Secretary of the Prime Minister's Department), Tuingariki Short (then Secretary of MOWEPP), Io Tuakeu-Lindsay (Director of the Environment Service), Peter Phillips, and Bruce Watson. And in this century a special thanks to Allen Allison (Vice president, Bishop Museum).

Project Financial Support

The Cook Islands Government has funded the Project since 1990. Agencies that have given important supportive funding directly facilitating the development of the database have been: New Zealand Agency for International Development (NZAID), Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), UNDP/GEF, Bishop Museum of Honolulu, and the Pacific Basin Information Node (PBIN). Other agencies that gave general financial suport to the Natural Heritage Project were: Pacific Development and Conservation Trust, South Pacific Regional Environmental Programme, Canada Fund, and UNDP.

Database Programmers

Although I planned the database and did endless trivial programming I want to give special mention to the professional programmers who at intervals propelled the database (and me) forward. In the sequential order of their involvement the programmers were: Sunil Krishna, Turia Vogel, Ken Fiore, Terry Farrah, Jack Stoffers (two months programming Access), Garth McCormack (duplicate-file finder), Richard Pyle (the original website 2003–04), and Justin McCormack (the new website 2005).

Database Assistants

I would like to give a special thanks to Fritha Stalker, the first Database Assistant, who spent 18 months sorting and selecting slides, inputting images, writing descriptions, and assisting with the system of classification that underlies the database. A special thanks for the months of image editing undertaken by Gwen Welland, and to Sonja Miller for months of detailed work on local corals and other marine invertebrates.

Overseas Experts

Names in bold denote those who made a major contribution to the Project.

Cook Islands Experts