Waikato's Department of Conservation boss Greg Martin is being briefed in Wellington today about potential job cuts as staff wait for the axe to fall at 10am tomorrow.



Forest and Bird announced in a statement last night that DOC plans to lay off about 100 frontline staff in favour of recruiting volunteers.



The independent conservation organisation claimed the restructure will have serious impacts on the wildlife and landscapes DOC exists to protect.



Forest and Bird said the cuts are expected to be significant, and follow several consecutive years of layoffs - about 120 jobs were lost in 2012 alone.



DOC spokesman Rory Newsam said he could not speak about what, if any, redundancies would be made in the Waikato Conservancy, consisting of the Hauraki, Waikato and Maniapoto area offices, as well as the conservancy office on Hamilton's Rostrevor St.



''Until we tell staff, we're not go

ing to be commenting publicly,'' Mr Newsam said. [The conservators] are being briefed then they go back and brief staff.''



The senior management team is briefing conservators and it'll take most of the day before staff learn their fate tomorrow morning at 10am.



The Green party reacted to the news by saying New Zealand's 100% Pure brand will be under threat.



The Greens say more than 265 jobs have been cut from the cash-strapped department since 2008.

Green party conservation spokeswoman Eugenie Sage said the jobs cuts would leave DOC without the expertise it needed to protect native plants and wildlife.



"The technical expertise and commitment of DOC staff are vital for conservation in New Zealand," she said.

"The funding pressure that National's budget cuts have put on DOC will put endangered species at risk.

"Volunteers and business cannot do the work of skilled conservation staff or meet the funding shortfall as the department is hoping.



"Our '100 per cent Pure' brand is intimately tied up with our strong environmental reputation. National's reckless job cuts and the resulting loss of expertise are undermining all that."



Forest and Bird advocacy manager Kevin Hackwell said DOC had been subject to continual cutbacks for several years, but previous reductions had been mainly at national or regional co-ordination level.



"They're now looking down where the frontline staff are, so this will really bite where a lot of the work happens," he said, adding he expected DOC would make greater use of volunteers.



"It'll be dressed up as some sort of advantage but it's not going to be," Hackwell said.



He said that volunteers would inevitably be engaged largely in light work in areas close to major urban centres, and the cuts would include work protecting endangered species deep in the conservation estate.



"These remote areas are impossible for volunteers to reach regularly," Hackwell said.



"Low numbers of people do not mean low numbers of possums, stoats and rats - quite the opposite."

However conservation minister Nick Smith this morning defended the restructuring, saying the organisation would be better off for the changes.