Environment Southland strategy, policy and science general manager Rachael Millar said the LiDAR mapping project was providing significant benefits to a wide range of users across the region.
LiDAR mapping of the region, incorporating both digital elevation and digital surface models, is now available.
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.
High-quality information is an important foundation for decision-making, and LiDAR provides critical data used to map and model changes to the environment.
Previous elevation maps only had contours down to 8m, whereas LiDAR allowed people to zoom right down to 1m in rural areas and down to 20cm contours in some urban areas.
The information gathered gave extremely accurate elevation data for all the inhabited parts of Southland, she said.
The project was partly co-funded by the four Southland councils and had 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. 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 and others. These include hazard planning, infrastructure planning and policy development, farm mapping, understanding landscape changes, and catchments’ hydrological processes such as stream flow estimation and catchment size.
Southland is one of 10 regions that partnered with Toitū Te Whenua Land Information New Zealand to obtain a baseline elevation data set. Co-funding between Southland’s four councils and MBIE Kānoa Provincial Growth Fund supported the regional expansion of Toitū Te Whenua’s 3D mapping programme to provide a significant increase in national coverage.
