Project - Landscape & Landcover - Marlborough District Council

Land use mapping

As part of Council’s revision of the regional water plan and as part of our catchment management initiatives, Council is working with Land and Water Science Ltd to build Marlborough a new land use/land cover and erosion vulnerability mapping.

Currently land use mapping relies on the national Land Cover Database (LCDB) platform. LCDB has significant delays between editions and can be up to 5 years out of date. LCDB land uses also follow categories that are nationally significant but may classify important regional land uses as a different class. The scale of LCDB is often too broad to be meaningful on a regional scale also.

The new regional mapping is based in largely on existing information with LCDB as a starting point. Refinements are being added such as a regional vineyards layer, zoning information consistent with the regional plan and re-classification of land uses to include regionally significant land uses.

Erosion Vulnerability Mapping is being carried out for the Te Hoiere Catchment and is funded by the Te Hoiere Project Conceptually, this work will combine surface features derived from LiDAR imagery with sub-surface features derived from a radiometric dataset as well as other existing data such as geology data and relic landslide mapping to better understand the likelihood and mechanisms of erosion in this catchment. Once completed, an erosion vulnerability layer can be combined with several other spatial datasets such as micro catchments and river network maps to identify areas that can be prioritised for erosion mitigation.