The chainsaws are out in force today as hundreds of volunteers remove wild pine trees in the Canterbury high country.
Hundreds of volunteers will be removing small conifer seedlings -- an important step toward preventing them from maturing and re-seeding.
Environment Canterbury warns wild pine trees could completely swamp our native bush if they're left to grow unchecked.
Graham Sullivan from Environment Canterbury says the volunteer days are an important annual event.
"They are removing regenerating trees. They are tomorrow's forest, so the work that they are doing now is giving us a breathing space for six or seven years while we deal with the source-feeding trees further up the catchment."
Mr Sullivan says they pose a significant risk to native species such as grassland and tussock.
"They just want to canopy and wipe them out. So they destroy eco-systems; they're a major threat to our whole country to water yield, and clearly water's a big thing for Canterbury."
It's estimated that if wild pines weren't controlled, they would spread to cover 20 percent of New Zealand within the next two decades.
Wild pine trees cover nearly 2 million hectares of the country's total land area.
Newshub.
