Neville Taylor Moar BSc, MSc, PhD (Cant.), 31 July 1926–1 June 2016

Neville Moar, 1973.Neville Moar was one of the key figures in New Zealand palynology. Over a career lasting nearly 70 years, he provided the foundation for many facets of this discipline in New Zealand, including vegetation history, wetland history, climate change, pollen morphology, areopalynology and melissopalynology.

Neville grew up as one of a family of three boys on his parents’ farm in the Pohangina Valley on the flanks of the southern Ruahine Ranges, just north of Palmerston North. The Pohangina Valley’s numerous small bush patches and streams nurtured his early interest in the natural environment. Neville was a boarder at the Fielding Agricultural High School, which was an unusual institution as it had its own working farm for the benefit of the largely rural pupils. The headmaster at the time, Dr Leonard Wild, was a leading geologist and agricultural scientist, as well as a dedicated and innovative educator. Dr Wild had as his assistant head Dr Harry Allan, who in 1928 became the founding director of the Plant Research Station in Palmerston North. In 1938, the station became Botany Division of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR). Vic Zotov also attended the school and later joined the Plant Research Station in 1928 as a grass taxonomist. Arthur Healy, a weed expert and ultimately assistant Director of Botany DSIR, also was a pupil at the school in the 1930s. The school thus provided the perfect environment for Neville’s growing interest in the sciences that were to become his life’s work.

Neville’s high school years (1940–1944) coincided with World War II and, although on leaving school he was in line for conscription and undertook some initial military training, the war was finishing. In 1945 he enrolled at Victoria University College for a double major degree in botany and zoology. He boarded at Weir House along with some illustrious fellow students including the historian and editor of the Listener W. H. Oliver, the poet and writer Alistair Te Ariki Campbell, geologist Paul Vella, and Ron Trotter, titan of New Zealand industry and chief executive of Fletcher Challenge.

In December 1947, having obtained his BSc degree, Neville was taken on as an assistant botanist at the newly formed Botany Division (then headquartered in Wellington) where he had been a vacation worker in the course of his university studies. His first role was to assist Dr Bill Harris who was studying peat soils, pollen morphology and developing the infant science of palynology, which had begun in New Zealand only a decade earlier with the pioneering investigations of Lucy Cranwell who had trained in Sweden with the founder of the discipline, Lennart von Post. A small palynological team had formed at Botany Division, including Doris Filmer (1945–1948), who worked on peat and honey pollen, and Rasma Licitis who conducted an aeropalynological survey (1954–1955). Neville wrote a description of those early days in the ‘Pollen Section’ in his appreciation of Bill Harris for his 90th birthday (Moar 1993a) of which this is an extract:

There was a general air of excitement abroad. Pollen analysis had played a part in solving a case of poisoned honey from Pongakawa and work on atmospheric pollen surveys was beginning to interest doctors working with patients suffering from hay fever. He was also attempting to persuade apiarists that pollen analysis had as much to offer their industry as it had for the study of vegetation and climate history. At the same time Bill was also actively engaged in trying to devise a method of classifying peat types and understanding the dynamics of the mires from which his samples were collected. There was clearly a lot to do and resources were limited. In 1947 the “Pollen Section” was staffed by Bill, Doris Filmer, who had collaborated in most of the projects mentioned, and myself as the junior. We were housed in one small room [about 5 by 4 m] in the Employers Federation building on The Terrace, Wellington, but later (1951) moved to rooms at I80 Lambton Quay … There was one table which served as writing desk, laboratory bench, and microscope station for the three of us, and when I had to make up slides for Bill and Doris they had to leave their microscopes and try to read or write. Microscopes were primitive and Bill used the best we had, an old monocular Watson which had clearly seen better days, but which was nevertheless pressed into service for photomicroscopy … Then there was no option but to be a palynological Jack of all trades and to explore as many different aspects of palynology as possible. Bill wanted to investigate for himself and so made sure that he personally explored as many sites in the field and collected as many samples as he possibly could despite a leg affected by childhood polio. I think of him trudging down Gollan’s Valley and back to Eastbourne by way of the coast and taking his turn at carrying the heavy steel peat borer over his shoulder, walking to Holly Flat at Mt Taranaki, or trying to sort out the ash layers on the Kaimanawa Range years before the source of the tephras was properly recognised, or their description attempted with any confidence. It was in the Kaimanawas that Bill, Tony Druce, and I lay for three days in a small tent as a violent southerly storm raged outside. Bill bore all of these trials, physical and material patiently, but with the clear aim of advancing palynology in New Zealand. His efforts were recognised when the “Pollen Section” obtained an electric centrifuge and then a binocular microscope. I remember the excitement when these wonderful instruments arrived, and the care with which the microscope, a Cooke, Troughton, and Simms, was treated.

Besides supporting the pollen section, Neville’s duties included the study of wetlands and, in particular, flax. A great deal of research was focused on the economic potential of flax until cheaper substitutes and removal of import restrictions ended the industry. When he enrolled for a part-time MSc at Victoria he continued this wetland theme with a study of the ecology of the peat swamps extending along the coast north of Wellington to the Manawatu (Moar 1952). He also assisted Ruth Mason in a major study of wetlands (1949–1960), taking part in surveys of Northland, Waikato, Nelson, Westland and Southland. Independently he surveyed the Tarawera River in the Bay of Plenty (Moar & Cunningham 1975) and peatlands on the Chatham Islands, and wetlands in the Cook Islands.

Neville moved south in 1954 when Botany Division transferred from Wellington to Christchurch and, ultimately, Lincoln. Bill Harris left the division shortly after the move, discouraged by the attitude of the new director, C. M. Smith, who had severe misgivings as to the scientific usefulness of pollen analysis. Neville shifted his focus to pollen analysis and vegetation history, although he also continued the pollen morphological, honey and aeropalynological studies initiated by Bill Harris. He began his exploration of past vegetation with pollen analysis of peat profiles from the Ruahine and Whanahuia Ranges in the central North Island (Moar 1956, 1961, 1967), the subantarctic Auckland Islands (he took part in the 1954 Falla expedition) (Moar 1958) and on the Chatham Islands.

Neville had a serious but undiagnosed congenital heart disorder in the form of a constricted aorta which had limited the amount of hard physical activity he could undertake and gave him frequent, debilitating headaches. In his first few years at Botany Division he often came close to collapse during the strenuous peat drilling and fieldwork he undertook, often in remote places such as the subantarctics. Matters came to a head in 1955 when, after a serious health breakdown, his problem was diagnosed and he was referred for open-heart surgery. Neville was one of the first patients in New Zealand to undergo this, at the time, exceptionally risky operation. It was a complete success and, for the first time in his life, he was free from pain and exhaustion.

Neville attended the Australia–New Zealand Association Conference for the Advancement of Science held in Dunedin in 1957, and this proved a pivotal point in his career. At the conference was Professor Harry Godwin, Director of the Subdepartment of Quaternary Research, Cambridge, England, and an international leader in the application of pollen analysis to the history of vegetation, landscapes and climate. Harry Godwin suggested that Neville would benefit from a PhD in his department and, in 1961, with DSIR support, Neville began a PhD at Cambridge on the late-glacial and post-glacial vegetation history of south-west Scotland, Shetland and Orkney Islands with Richard West as his supervisor (Moar 1969b, 1969c, 1969d). The Subdepartment of Quaternary Research was in the forefront of Quaternary studies at that time and Neville had as colleagues leading Quaternary scientists such as Donald Walker and Nicholas Shackleton, and travelled widely in Europe to attend conferences. On the Orkneys—the home of his paternal grandparents—Neville was delighted to be able to make the acquaintance of his relatives in the course of his fieldwork. On the voyage back on the ocean liner Southern Cross in 1964, Neville met his future wife, Maria de Zwart.

In the early 1950s, New Zealand Quaternary research was at a turning point: the debate over whether there had been a single or multiple glaciations had been resolved in favour of many, and research on periglacial deposits, loess, volcanic tephra and marine-cut terraces was proceeding rapidly. New Zealand was also fortunate that the DSIR was at the forefront of radiocarbon dating technology, and a DSIR radiocarbon dating service from the early 1950s permitted critical advances in Quaternary chronology that had been previously impossible. However, the contribution from pollen analysis to Quaternary studies had been sporadic rather than systematic. Lucy Cranwell (based at the Auckland Museum) had established the field with a pioneering study of Southland (Cranwell & von Post 1936), which she followed up with a series of bulletins and papers on the pollen morphology of the indigenous vascular plants (Cranwell 1940, 1942, 1954), but left New Zealand in 1944. As Bill Harris had numerous other duties, Quaternary vegetation history research proceeded slowly.

On his return, Neville put his recent experiences at Cambridge to good use by pursuing his core scientific mission: a detailed, systematic and ground-breaking study of the changes in Quaternary vegetation and climate of the South Island. Neville’s main scientific contribution was to show how the major fluctuations in climate were reflected in the ever-shifting composition of the vegetation, in particular in response to Quaternary fluctuations of glaciers in the Southern Alps. In 1970 he published a key paper on the postglacial vegetation history of the northern South Island in which he presented results from 14 peatland sites. This was the first comprehensive vegetation history study in New Zealand since Lucy Cranwell, and it set a new direction. Through numerous radiocarbon dated sites he was able to show that forest established around 11,700 years ago, was overwhelmingly podocarp/hardwood (and not beech forest as had been previously assumed), with beech forest spreading later and diachronously. By establishing the timing of postglacial vegetation sequences he reset the debate on the influence of postglacial climates which had been dominated by the idea that very recent climate deterioration in the last few hundred years was responsible for many features of the structure and distribution of current forests (Holloway 1954). Perhaps the high point of this phase of his career came in 1973 when Christchurch hosted the IX Congress of the International Union for Quaternary Research. Neville was on the organising committee (1971–1973) for this highly successful event which was preceded by an unprecedented surge of Quaternary research and conference-focused publications which have underpinned the field in New Zealand ever since.

He then turned to the longer term history of glaciations and was fortunate to be joined in this enterprise by New Zealand’s preeminent glacial geologist, Dr Pat Suggate of the New Zealand Geological Survey. They forged a productive scientific partnership and friendship that lasted from the 1960s right up until the last few months of their lives when they were actively working on their latest West Coast manuscript. The narrow coastal strip of the South Island West Coast with its impressive moraine and outwash sequences, marine-cut platforms, and abundant peats and lakes, was ideal for a comprehensive integration of vegetation and glacial history. However, the sequences also presented numerous difficulties in the form of near-identical pollen sequences for different interglacials, widespread contamination of radiocarbon dates from shallow peats and silts, and problems in correlating glacial features across a broken and often heavily forested landscape. Neville’s key contribution was made in 1996 with Pat Suggate as co-author, in an overview of the 150,000-year history of Westland vegetation painstakingly reconstructed from many peat and lake sediment layers sandwiched between glacial outwash, topping marine-cut platforms or buried by loess (Moar & Suggate 1996). Neville did not neglect the rest of the South Island, publishing numerous papers on the vegetation history of the eastern South Island including an influential study of full glacial environments which showed for the first time the lack of trees and open grasslands and herbfields of the eastern hills and plains (Moar 1980). He summarised this eastern work in his chapter on the vegetation history in the Natural History of Canterbury (2009).

Although Quaternary vegetation history was Neville’s major research interest, he did not neglect other palynological themes. While early work by Lucy Cranwell and Bill Harris (Cranwell 1940, 1942, 1954; Harris 1955) had provided basic descriptions of pollen and spores of indigenous vascular plants, and a large pollen and spore collection had been assembled at Botany Division, microscopes and photomicroscopy had improved, numerous taxonomic revisions had been published, and therefore the existing pollen and spore manuals were badly out of date by the 1980s. Neville had a long-standing commitment to pollen morphological studies, contributing some in-depth studies (Moar 1966) and he saw the need for a well-illustrated formal treatment that would also serve as an identification guide. After many years of careful work, in part during his retirement, he completed a comprehensive atlas of New Zealand dicotyledonous pollen grains which has remained the key reference work in New Zealand palynology (Moar 1993b). This he followed some years later with a synoptic guide to the pollen and spores of all New Zealand vascular plants summarising the differences between various pollen and spore types and their prevalence in the pollen rain, and suggesting a standardised nomenclature (Moar et al. 2011).

Neville also was the main contributor to the now nationally significant pollen reference collection, which began with Lucy Cranwell’s collections from about 1935 and has been added to by Botany Division and Landcare Research palynologists ever since. Now housed in the Long Term Ecology Laboratory at Landcare Research, this microscope slide collection currently has over 11,000 microscope slides of pollen from nearly 4000 herbarium specimens. This collection formed the basis of Neville’s pollen morphological descriptions for his pollen atlas, and provides an essential tool to assist palynologists with pollen identification.

Neville’s ability to accurately recognise and recall the identity of a pollen grain was legendary and will be sorely missed; he never tired of looking down our microscopes to help us identify the tricky grains, right up to the last week of his life.

Interpretation of past pollen assemblages relies on a good understanding of the present occurrence and representation of pollen and spores. Neville was the first to show that Australian source pollen grains of Acacia, Eucalyptus and Casuarina were part of the pollen rain in New Zealand demonstrating their presence in Australian red dust deposits on high altitude snow fields (Moar 1969a) and made the first substantial contribution to understanding modern pollen representation in relation to indigenous vegetation with his survey of surface pollen spectra in the South Island (Moar 1970). He also contributed to a much cited study which explored the transport by air of biological material across the Tasman (Close et al. 1978).

Neville was for many years one of only a handful of researchers who had any in-depth knowledge of palynology and he was generous in helping out with supervision and mentoring of students, and responding to various requests for specialist input into matters such as pollen as allergens, forensics and insect pest pollinators. One of these calls on his time was the characterisation of honey and bee pellets. As the export honey trade became more sophisticated, it needed a reliable way of quantifying nectar sources for labelling of honey. Neville undertook a comprehensive analysis of the pollen content of honeys in relation to their nectar sources, a foundational contribution which has been a key to certification of nectar sources (Moar 1985). He never informed the beekeepers taking part in the study that only a few grams of honey were necessary, not a 1 kg tin and, because of this uncharacteristic slip, the whole laboratory enjoyed a plentiful, varied supply of honeys over several years.

Besides his scientific work, Neville assisted with running the division and oversaw a small science group which included palynology, plant anatomy and the electron microscope unit. Botany Division directors recognised that Neville was a safe pair of hands and he was thus involved in planning for buildings and acquisition of major new equipment such as microscopes. As part of a commitment by Botany Division to halt the spread of the invasive noxious grass Nassella, in 1950 he began what turned out to be a 26-year association with the Nassella Tussock Boards, serving on the North Canterbury and later Marlborough Boards. However, administration and committee work was definitely not something he enjoyed and he was never tempted to abandon pollen and vegetation history.

The State Services Commission had a very strict rule regarding retirement: 40 years’ service or 65 years of age. Neville’s retirement thus came at the age of 61 in December 1987, far too early he felt, which he proved by working on for another 29 years. He was a very active research associate and valued member of the palaeoecology laboratory in Botany Division and, after 1992, the successor scientific organisation, Landcare Research. He had a permanent niche in the laboratory where, over his nearly 30 years of retirement, he turned up most days, undertaking new pollen analytical work, assisting with curation of the pollen and spore slide collection, producing a stream of scientific papers and book chapters, and mentoring staff and students. He was working on a guide to the pollen morphology of New Zealand monocots, and a new Quaternary publication, right up until the week before his death.

Neville took a particular interest in New Zealand history and had an extensive book collection on the subject, including some rare volumes. This interest extended to the local history of Lincoln, where he had lived since 1964 and a community to which he personally contributed a great deal. He spent a number of years—in the free time he had after his commitment to the laboratory—tracking down the 19th century history of local institutions, churches, notables, families, farms, buildings and infrastructure. In 2011, he published this research (with the aid of Creative New Zealand) as a very well-received and sold-out volume on the history of Lincoln (Moar 2011). Neville was devoted to his family, and is survived by his wife Maria, his daughter Joanne and son Andrew. His eldest son James died in a climbing accident on Aoraki/Mount Cook in 1987.

Neville’s scientific associates from New Zealand and elsewhere in the world are unanimous in describing him as a gentleman, generous to a fault and considerate of others. At Landcare Research he was our much loved kaumātua, sharing his knowledge and supporting us right up until the end; he is dearly missed.