A sediment trap system was designed, constructed and deployed to sample sinking marine particles in a variety of marine environments around New Zealand, primarily focussing on the Chatham Rise-Subtropical Convergence (STC) region in the Southwest Pacific Ocean, east of New Zealand. Field experiments in Evans Bay, Wellington Harbour, showed that there were minimal hydrodynamic interactions between traps on the same array. Furthermore, baffles did not significantly affect trapping efficiency, whereas brine volume had a profound effect. In the latter case, traps filled completely with a high-density salt brine collected 2-3 times less material than traps with basal brine thicknesses equal in height to 1- and 2.5-cylinder diameters. During multi-disciplinary New Zealand JGOFS studies in subantarctic, STC and subtropical waters in winter and spring 1993, it was found that, despite substantial temporal and spatial differences in physical and biological parameters, total mass and particulate phosphorus fluxes were not significantly different across the three water types. High levels of variability between trap samples are attributed to errors associated with subsampling procedures; a problem that appears to be widespread in other, more exhaustive sediment trap experiments in oligotrophic environments. In order to improve the statistical power of the experiments, more than two free-floating sediment trap moorings are required to discriminate between water type differences. Particulate fluxes appeared to be decoupled from upper ocean primary production, and in the STC, affected markedly by tidal resuspension of bottom sediments from the crest of Chatham Rise. The presence of photosynthetic pigments in trap samples from 100 to 550 m depths suggests that sinking material are transported rapidly out of well lit surface waters, probably as intact marine aggregates or mesozooplankton faecal pellets. The low concentrations of phaeopigments, suggest that organic material has not been degraded in the upper ocean prior to sinking. Furthermore, low rates of pigment export as a function of phytoplankton biomass and primary production (<5%) suggest that other processes, such as microzooplankton grazing, were operating in the upper water column to prevent pronounced sedimentation of organic material out of surface layers. The Southwest Pacific Ocean is recognised as an important regional, probably biologically mediated sink for atmospheric carbon dioxide. Sediment trap results from the STC region are statistically ambivalent in terms of assessing the efficiency of the biological pump in removing carbon from the upper ocean by sinking processes. However, the persistence of undegraded pigmented material at 550 m depth, the continental margin affinities suggested by relatively high mean mass fluxes, and the observation that particulate carbon can comprise up to 40% of mass flux, all suggest that biological pump efficiency is also enhanced in this region. More work is required, however, to determine the temporal and spatial variability of particulate fluxes in the Southwest Pacific Ocean in order to develop an understanding of how the biological pump functions in this region.