In Māori culture, it is an important source of timber for the building of waka and making of tools, of food in the form of its berries, and of dye.

The pollen is a pale yellow colour and has a three-pored or trisaccate shape that is distinctive in the New Zealand flora and so can be identified easily.

[8] The receptacles and seeds have been found to contain anthocyanins, rare in gymnosperms, which it was suggested in one 1988 paper make the fruit as a whole more attractive to prospective animal dispersers.

Thick woods of it were everywhere upon the banks, every tree as straight as a pine, and of immense size, and the higher we went the more numerous they were.Kahikatea was first described in 1832 by the French botanist Achille Richard in his Essai d'une Flore de la Nouvelle Zélande (Essay On The Flora of New Zealand) as Podocarpus dacrydioides.

[13] It was superfluously named Dacrydium excelsum by Allan Cunningham in the 1838 issue of Annals of Natural History,[14] and transferred to the genus Nageia by Otto Kuntze in 1891.

[12] Dacrycarpus means tear shaped fruit, and the specific epithet dacrydioides is after its similarity to species in the genus Dacrydium.

[2][18] Kahikatea prefers flooded or alluvial soils with low levels of drainage,[2] which in Westland occur from post glaciation events.

[19] Under optimal circumstances a mature kahikatea can produce 800 kilograms (1,800 lb) of fruit, equivalent to 4.5 million seeds, in a year.

One 2008 study in the New Zealand Journal of Ecology found a mean retention time of kahikatea seeds in kererū of 44.5 minutes.

[22] Intraspecific competition between kahikatea trees was found in a 1999 study to be an important factor in their survival and overall success, affecting both the rates of growth and of mortality.

Because of the consistency of these events in South Westland however, many forested areas don't progress beyond regaining kahikatea and rimu, as other species, such as kāmahi, need the environment to improve before they can return.

The near 16-acre (6.47 ha) reserve was held in the Deans family for 70 years before it was gifted to Christchurch by them in 1914,[31] and subsequently formally protected in the Riccarton Bush Bill.

[33] Reservation of stands may not totally protect kahikatea, however, because the alluvial plains that they favour are prone to upheaval and erosion and so trees may still become damaged.

[34] Despite this, kahikatea has been classified as least concern by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and "Not Threatened" by the New Zealand Threat Classification System, which gives it an estimated population of above 100,000.

[5] Kahikatea are considered a light-demanding species that struggles to progress beyond the sapling stage in areas with high willow density.

Although some non-native birds, such as the common blackbird, are also prolific seed-spreaders, survival of the kahikatea seeds are further threatened by introduced mice and rats.

[27] 19th century British ethnographers Richard Taylor, Eldson Best, and William Colenso all recorded the fruit of kahikatea being eaten, and that it was given its own name: koroī.

[40] J. H. Kerry-Nicholls and William Colenso both recorded a blue or black dye being obtained from the soot of burning kahikatea's resin or heart wood, called kāpara or māpara.