Where did the tiles go?

The brown tiles, also known as Onduline Artificial Cover Objects (ACOs) are going to be taken in for a couple of months this winter. This doesn’t mean that the lizard garden project has finished though – they are only being packed down temporarily. We’re doing this to standardize the monitoring process. The problem is that the lizards become increasingly habituated to using the ACOs because they’re safe, sheltered and warm places to hang out in (or on). So, the longer the ACOs are in place for, the more likely lizards are to use them. Also, it’s not understood whether Wellington lizard populations benefit from the ACOs being at the sites. To ensure that any changes in the populations are due to the habitat enhancements (plantings and rock piles), and not due to the ACOs, we need to take the ACOs off the sites for a bit this winter to ‘re-train’ the lizards so that they resume their normal patterns of habitat use and unaltered population parameters. The ACOs will go back in place in August/September in order to be ready for the next monitoring session (which we call the ‘early summer’ monitor) in October 2019.