The Government expects the streamlined department in Queenstown to form more successful partnerships in the footsteps of the 11-year-old Queenstown Trails Trust, the four-year-old Wakatipu Wilding Conifer Control Group and the 19-month-old Wakatipu Heritage Trust and help them reach their full potential.
Three operational positions, all staffed by rangers with decades of frontline conservation experience, and one vacant position were lost out of 26 positions and one position was gained.
The Doc Wakatipu area office, at Arthurs Point, closed last Friday and opened on Monday as the ''Doc Wakatipu District Office'', with Glenorchy a ''field base''.
Staff resigned and found other employment before the restructuring took effect on Monday.
Greg Lind said his previous role as area manager meant increasingly he had less time to spend on operational projects.
Now, as district manager, a role he said he wanted, he was able to focus on public-private joint initiatives and their outcomes.
His counterpart, the conservation services manager, will be appointed in an acting or permanent capacity within the next week.
Queenstown was a ''fertile ground'' for more conservation partnerships with tourism operators, he said.
''There's so much activity here and we've got some big players who are operating on conservation land and a lot of them are very aware of the opportunities for 'greening' their businesses because the customer is increasingly demanding it.
''Queenstown was given a lot of consideration in terms of those opportunities, I can assure you.''
Mr Lind said changes to the department would not be very visible to the public and the transition among staff will take place over three months.
However, the changes are ''reasonably significant'' internally, with the department restructured from head office in Wellington down to community level into two streams.
''The conservancies as we've known them, Otago and Southland etc, cease to exist in the new model,'' Mr Lind said.
There are now managers who represent the two streams within the organisation - the partnership model and the service model, he said.
New service director Alan Munn, based in Invercargill, ''manages essentially all of Otago and Southland, with minor exceptions in North Otago'', while partnership manager Barry Hanson, based in Dunedin, ''manages north of Christchurch all the way to Stewart Island and sub-Antarctic,''Mr Lind said.
