World Data - Page 2

Irrigation is used to support land use, particularly in areas with low or seasonal rainfall. Irrigation can improve the productivity of land for farming activity, and support amenity or recreational land uses within urban environments.Irrigation can also alter the natural character of our landscapes (eg change dry land to greener and wetter land), and can increase nutrient (phosphorus and nitrogen) runoff and leaching into waterways.

More information on this dataset and how it relates to our environmental reporting indicators and topics can be found in the attached data quality pdf.

Summary report available at www.mfe.govt.nz/fresh-water/technical-guidance-and...

Annual rainfall is the total accumulated rain over one year. Rain is vital for life, including plant growth, drinking water, river ecosystem health, and sanitation. Floods and droughts affect our environment, economy, and recreational opportunities.

This dataset shows annual average rainfall across New Zealand for years 1972 to 2013. Annual rainfall is estimated from the daily rainfall estimates of the Virtual Climate Station Network (NIWA).

This dataset relates to the "Annual average rainfall" measure on the Environmental Indicators, Te taiao Aotearoa website.

Geometry: raster catalogue
Unit: mm/yr

Note: Metadata relates to LiDAR point clouds. This layer has been provided to enable users to explore coverage and capture dates of the LiDAR. To enquire about ordering the LiDAR and/or related orthophotography, please e-mail lucas[at]mfe.govt.nz.

Ministry for the Environment, Land Use Carbon Analysis System collection of swaths of LiDAR over planted forests of interest (raw and classified returns) from 2006 to 2015.

Land Environments of New Zealand (LENZ) is a classification of fifteen climate, landform, and soil variables chosen for their relevance to biological distributions. Classification groups were derived by automatic classification using a multivariate procedure. Four levels of classification detail have been produced from this analysis, containing 20, 100, 200, and 500 groups respectively.
More information is available from the LENZ web site:
www.landcareresearch.co.nz/databases/lenz/

The New Zealand River Environment Classification (REC) organises information about the physical characteristics of New Zealand's rivers. Individual river sections are mapped according to physical factors such as climate, source of flow for the river water, topography, and geology, and catchment land cover eg, forest, pasture or urban. Sections of river that have similar ecological characteristics can then be grouped together, no matter where they are.

This information is mapped for New Zealand's entire river network - over 425,000 kilometres of river. Different types of rivers respond differently to the pressures placed on them - the REC can be used to highlight the most appropriate management tools and approaches to reduce these pressures for each river type. Information from the classification is used to develop policy, assess the environment, and report on the quality of river water.

Stream order is the numerical position of a tributary or section of a river within the entire network. Headwater streams are assigned a stream order of 1. When two tributaries of the same stream order meet, the order increments by one for the next section downstream. However, if two sections meet where one section has higher order than the other, the next section downstream has the same order as the highest upstream section.

Additional metadata can be found at www.mfe.govt.nz/publications/ser/metadata/env-clas... .

The REC groups rivers and parts of river networks that share similar ecological characteristics, including physical and biological. Rivers that share the same class can be treated as similar to one another and different to rivers in other classes. The REC classification system groups rivers according to several environmental factors that strongly influence or cause the rivers’ physical and ecological characteristics (climate, topography, geology and land cover). A catchment is a polygon that defines the upstream watershed of a river system or sub-system. Land cover within the catchment was used to populate the river classification factors (see table 1.1 of the User Guide data.mfe.govt.nz/document/123-rec-user-guide-2010/ ).

Additional metadata can be found at www.mfe.govt.nz/publications/ser/metadata/env-clas... .

16 April 2020: Subsequent to publication in April 2019 we discovered two small errors with this dataset. These included:

• Errors in the coordinates of some sites and their associated metadata (such as landcover and elevation).
• Errors in our calculation of dominant landcover.

In addition, flow data from TopNet has also been updated.

These changes have a minor impact on overall results. These changes have have been corrected, and are republished here, as part of the Our freshwater 2020 release.

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This dataset measures how water quality in New Zealand’s rivers is changing over time. It contains nine parameters of water quality based on measurements made at monitored river sites in years 1990-2017:

• Nitrate-nitrogen
• Ammoniacal nitrogen
• Total nitrogen
• Total phosphorus
• Dissolved reactive phosphorus
• Water clarity
• Turbidity
• Escherichia coli
• Macroinvertebrate community index

More information on this dataset and how it relates to our environmental reporting indicators and topics can be found in the attached data quality pdf.

Summary report available at www.mfe.govt.nz/publications/fresh-water/water-qua....

"Wetlands support unique biodiversity and provide important services. They clean water of nutrients and sediment, help dampen floods, provide habitat, and act as carbon sinks. They are also valued for their spiritual and cultural significance and as important sources of food and materials, such as flax. Draining them for agricultural and urban development has reduced their extent. Understanding this reduction provides insight into the loss of biodiversity and natural function.
This dataset relates to the ""Wetland extent"" measure on the Environmental Indicators, Te taiao Aotearoa website. "

"Land cover describes the extent of vegetation, water bodies, built environments, and bare natural surfaces (eg gravel and rock) across New Zealand. Measuring the composition and changes in land cover can help us understand the pressures that different land uses are placing on the biodiversity and functioning of ecosystems.

This data set relates to the "Land cover" measure on the Environmental Indicators, Te taiao Aotearoa website."

Coastal hydrosystems describe coastal features that span a gradient from near coast freshwater lakes/wetlands (lacustrine/palustrine environments) to marine. The term 'coastal hydrosystem' avoids the common error of referring to all such features as estuaries, mislabelling the numerous types that are non-estuarine and have different behavioural characteristics and management sensitivities from any truly estuarine environment. It also encompasses the coastal systems that do not represent end-of-river environments (e.g., some pocket beaches and embayments) or are so large and complex as to be fed by several freshwater drainage features (rivers, streams, wetlands) but which are dominated by none (e.g., some harbours, fjords, sounds and coastal-lacustrine systems). It also incorporates the multiple aspects of each system, including beaches, spits, barriers, river mouths, wetlands, saltmarshes and other geomorphic, ecological and hydrological features.

The New Zealand Coastal Hydrosystem classification (NZCH) is a classification of coastal hydrosystems within New Zealand including some offshore islands. The coastal hydrosystems classification is based on a hierarchical view of the abiotic components that comprise the environments of coastal hydrosystems. This classification presents detail at the geomorphic class level because this level is particularly important for coastal management and conservation needs at national and regional scales.

The primary GIS is the point layer. Supporting files (attached) include: a CSV database of environmental variables; GIS polygon layer; and Google Earth (.kmz) point and polygon exports.

The database, GIS and Google Earth files should be used in conjunction with the Classification of New Zealand's Coastal Hydrosystems report (Hume et al. 2016) (also attached) which documents a full description of the database, the calculation procedures and limitations to the variables.

The spreadsheet comprises a database of 500 New Zealand coastal hydrosystems and their associated environmental variables developed for the report.

The GIS point file comprises 500 New Zealand coastal hydrosystems and their associated environmental variables developed for the database. The environmental variables are mapped at 1:50,000 scale.

NOTE: Within the point attribute file -9999 represents the environmental variables with no data as shown in the spreadsheet as a blank cell. Make sure to exclude these values from analyses.

The polygon files comprise 420 New Zealand coastal hydrosystems depicting their general shape of the water body basin at high tide and upstream limit.

The .kmz files are derived from the NZCH GIS point and polygon layers for use with Google Earth.

The report provides a classification of coastal hydrosystems within New Zealand including some offshore islands. The coastal hydrosystems classification reconciles and clarifies coastal hydrosystem terminology and produces a hierarchy and classification of coastal wetland, riverine, estuarine and marine types. This report identifies and provides a list of environmental variables that describe the characteristics and properties of about 500 discrete coastal hydrosystems that can be used to provide national and regional statistics on coastal hydrosystems. An Identification Key is provided to guide the determination of the classes.