Plant ecologist Alan Mark has spent most of his life researching the ecology and sustainable management of indigenous ecosystems. He has served on several official organisations, including Manapouri–Te Anau Lake Guardians, National Parks and Reserves Authority, Conservation Authority, Otago Conservation Board, Land Settlement Board, Mountain Lands Committee and Fiordland Marine Guardians. He is a distinguished life member of the Forest & Bird Protection Society, a life member of the NZ Ecological Society and the Ecological Society of America, an honorary member of the NZ Alpine Club, a Fellow of the Royal Society of NZ and recipient of the society's Hutton Medal and Fleming Environmental Award. He received a CBE in 1989, a DCNZM in 2001 and was knighted in 2009 for his services to conservation. He received an honorary DSc from the University of Otago in 2014.

Neville Peat is an award-winning New Zealand nature writer and biographer. His books also cover genres such as history, geography and the environment. The original edition of Wild Dunedin won the inaugural Montana New Zealand Book Awards’ Natural Heritage Category in 1996. In 2007 he was awarded New Zealand’s largest literary prize, the Creative New Zealand Michael King Writers’ Fellowship, for a book about the Tasman Sea. He lives on the Otago Peninsula, handy to albatrosses, penguins and sea lions.