If you have lived in New Zealand for long enough, I am sure you would have heard of the poison 1080, used by the Department of Conservation (DOC) as a form of pest control. 1080 can be used in bait stations or by airdrop, which is used for many of the remote and hard to get to areas in the New Zealand wilderness. The use of this poison has been a contested area for many years, because of the fear that it does more harm than good to our native birds. This fear in my belief, is the product of a lack of information that is easy for people to understand.

Here at OptimalBI we do cool sh!t with data so I am going to use data to show you the effectiveness of 1080 drops. I have read over research papers from DOC and found some data that I think is the best for showing why the use of 1080 is an acceptable pest control method. You can find the study I used for the visualization below here.

Kea Infographic

The population of kea are spread thin and far around New Zealand’s Alpine forests and to help protect them from predators in this harsh landscape DOC has used air dropped 1080 to kill off pest that would kill them here are the results of a 4 year study at two sites one working as a control with no 1080 used.

Like the look of the kea in this infographic?  You can have it!  For free!  Just go check out our free visualisation tool OVE and download it.  Hope you enjoy.

Steven.