A four-year joint project to deliver three-dimensional, high-resolution mapping of Southland has been completed.
Environment Southland’s general manager for strategy, policy and science, Rachael Millar, said LiDAR will provide significant benefits to a wide range of users across the region.
LiDAR refers to an airborne remote sensing method that uses pulsed lasers to measure variable distances to the earth, generating a precise, three-dimensional model of the earth’s surface and features.
Previous elevation maps showed contours only down to 8m, whereas LiDAR allows people to zoom right down to 1m in rural areas and down to 20cm contours in some urban areas.
The founder of Invercargill-based environmental consultancy Land and Water Science, Clint Rissmann, said LiDAR is a significant step towards bringing the resolution of environmental data down to a scale that’s more in line with what farmers already know about their land.
“Historically, our topographic layers have been pretty limited, making it difficult to accurately assess slope and topography.
“Farmers, on the other hand, make decisions every day based on a much finer understanding of their landscape.
“LiDAR is probably the first real step towards bridging that gap between those often coarse datasets and something much more tangible and relevant to farmers.
“From my experience, when farmers see scientific outputs that truly reflect the realities of their property, they’re more likely to use and trust that information – just like anyone else.
“If the data resonates with what they know about their farm, it becomes a valuable tool in their decision-making process.
“LiDAR is particularly useful for identifying slope angles, assessing erosion risks, and understanding drainage patterns on the farm.
“It can also provide farmers with the type of physical detail needed for planning future developments, investments, and mitigation strategies. It’s really an exciting advancement for New Zealand’s agriculture sector.”
The project was partly co-funded by the four Southland councils and has taken four years and thousands of hours in data collection, processing, and checking.
“The region hasn’t had a tool before that provides such detail and it is going to be particularly useful in planning for Southland’s future,” Millar said.
“The council will use it for flood modelling, coastal inundation mapping and to help with farm planning, to name a few.”
The resulting high-definition maps and models are being used in a range of applications for councils.
These include hazard planning, infrastructure planning and policy development, farm mapping, and understanding landscape changes and catchments’ hydrological processes such as stream flow estimation and catchment size, Millar said.
Ten regions partnered with Toitū Te Whenua Land Information New Zealand to obtain a baseline elevation data set.
Co-funding between Southland’s four councils and the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment Kānoa Provincial Growth Fund supported the regional expansion of Toitū Te Whenua’s 3D mapping programme to provide a significant increase in national coverage, Millar said.
In Focus Podcast | Platform to power farm succession
Two South Island farmers have launched an online platform, Landify, which helps young farmers looking to get into farm ownership find investors and sellers.
Co-founder Sarah How tells Bryan that while the sector has talked about the problem of succession for years there has been relatively few tools developed to deal with the problem.
