A regional summary of 2012 land use

Motu completed land-use simulations for the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment in November 2013 using the Land Use in Rural New Zealand (LURNZ) model. The original model results were based on an initial land-use map of 2008, constructed from the Land Cover Data Base (LCDB) version 3.

Documentation for these results is contained in the report “Land Use and Farming Intensity: For 1996, 2008 and 2020” (Anastasiadis and Kerr, 2013). Please refer to this document for a full description of the model.

Since the completion of the report, version 4 of the LCDB with land-use information for 2012 has been released, providing an opportunity to assess how some of the simulation results compare to actual land-use change patterns (at the regional scale). The comparison requires that we process and amend the data in LCDB4 in a manner that is consistent with our previous approach.

In this brief technical report, we document the main steps involved with a focus on new data processing; more detail about the model and methodology is provided by Anastasiadis and Kerr (2013).