Dr Barbara Anderson is a scientist who makes no bones about climate change.
While striding to the top of Mt Cardrona with me recently, she suggested not believing climate change exists is like not believing in owls.
Dr Anderson has a colourful, farmer's daughter way of summarising the climate change evidence she encountered during eight years studying ''big data'' in the United Kingdom.
Her job at the University of York was to follow the response of butterflies to the changing climate over the last 30 years, and she had 109 million records at her disposal.
England, she says, has a wealth of data collected by many scientists about a great many plant and animal species over a long period.
''People have been going out, taking notes of what is where and when it is in that place for hundreds of years, literally, and they have millions and millions of records.''
This ''big data'' has been invaluable in tracking the relatively slow-moving phenomenon of climate change.
But New Zealand, Dr Anderson says, lacks this resource - a gap the programme she has just begun on Mt Cardrona will help address.
Her intention is to record everything about the life and the climate along a single ridgeline between the 1936m peak of the mountain, over the back of the Cardrona Alpine Resort, and the valley floor near the Cardrona township at 500m.
The ridge is part of Branch Creek Station, Dr Anderson's family farm where she grew up mustering, snow-raking and exploring.
Her intensive five-year study attracted a government-funded $800,000 Rutherford Discovery Fellowship, administered by the Royal Society of New Zealand.
The funding will cover the cost of her own work but she is also expanding the boundaries of the study by collaborating with other scientists.
On our trek to the top - having admittedly driven to the skifield's base building and then prevailed on the obliging maintenance staff to run the ski lift for us - we were accompanied by a swag of scientists with special interests.
One from Spain, is looking at viruses, one from Dunedin has an interest in moths and others from Auckland are investigating plant communities and ecosystem functions.
The group take a variety of measurements on the steep, treeless ridge from the top to the bottom and from the sunny north face to the shady east and west sides.
''The idea is to get the base of how [plants and insects] are actually interacting now ... and how they are controlled by the environmental gradient,'' Dr Anderson said.
Her work as part of a large group of scientists in the United Kingdom showed the change in distribution of species such as the comma butterfly was faster than with other butterfly species.
''We have shown many species' ranges have already shifted both upslope and polewards with climate change.''
She says observing the changes brought by climate change allows scientists to make ''informed guesses'' about why some species are able to keep up with the pace of climate change and other species are not.
While her programme will cover too short a period for her to see species changing, it will provide a starting point for studies in decades to come.
''One of the things people in New Zealand quite often say is that we don't have any evidence for climate change.
''And my response to that is we don't have the data, so of course we don't.''
For popular consumption, Dr Anderson has given the title of her study - ''biotic interaction and thermal refugia'' - the ''Lord of the Ringsy'' title of ''battlefields and safe havens''.
Rutherford Fellowships
• The Government funds 10 Rutherford Discovery Fellowships each year, administered by the Royal Society of New Zealand.
• The three to five-year fellowships are designed to support the development of future research leaders and assist with the retention and repatriation of early to mid-career researchers.
• The fellowships are intended to develop ''the future leaders in the New Zealand science and innovation system''.
• Dr Anderson is hosted by Landcare Research in its Dunedin office.
Source: Royal Society.
