Dr Dean Meason, a senior scientist with the Scion group of the Bioeconomy Science Institute, has been named New Zealand Institute of Forestry’s 2025 Forester of the Year.

The award recognises Dean’s outstanding contribution to forest hydrology research, which has provided insights that are shaping the future of forestry and water management around New Zealand. From 2019 - 2024, Dean led Scion’s Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment-funded Forest Flows research programme, which provides a more accurate picture of what’s happening to the water in New Zealand’s forests and helps inform regional freshwater policy development and land-use decisions in a changing climate. Post-2024 support from Forest Growers Research is focussed on developing a forest hydrology toolkit for foresters.

Dean and his team have further MBIE funding (through the Catalyst fund) to collaborate with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst on continued research. This new programme, focussed on the Aupōuri Peninsula’s Te Hiku region (Northland), will use data from NASA satellite missions to find a new way to accurately measure water use for different land uses and how it varies across the region.