Land Use Cover and Highly Productive Land

Land, including landforms, soils, vegetative cover, biodiversity and various land-based activities, is the basis of the majority of primary productive activity in the Marlborough district.

Sustainable land management includes practices which maintain or enhance the condition of the land resource. This can include monitoring and managing the soils and landforms, the vegetative cover, the visual amenity of an area, the margins of waterways and so on. Different land uses and management programmes will be relevant in different parts of the Marlborough region.

Marlborough District Council has a range of policies and monitoring programmes in place to assist with management of land-based resources and is also involved in research and monitoring programmes carried out by other agencies.

Monitoring of land cover is carried out using the central Government's Land Cover Database (LCDB) along with more refined Council mapping of viticulture development areas.

Land Use Classification

The Marlborough Land Use Capability Classification of Marlborough is one of a series documenting the New Zealand Land Resource Inventory (NZLRI). It presents the land use capability classification for 154 land use capability (LUC) units, used in the second edition of the NZLRI, (1:50000 scale) for the Marlborough Region and includes descriptions and keys to their recognition.

The New Zealand Land Resource Inventory (NZLRI) is a national database of physical land resource information. It comprises of two sets of data 1) Physical factors (rock, soil, slope, erosion and vegetation) and 2) A land use capability rating of each map unit based on an assessment of the ability of the five physical factors, together with climate and the effects of past land use, to provide sustained agricultural production.

The NZLRI data have been widely used by local territorial authorities such as regional councils, government corporations, government departments, private companies, consultants and other agencies involved in planning rural land use or management of natural resources.

Go to the NZLRI on the Landcare Research website