New Zealand Land Resource Inventory

The New Zealand Land Resource Inventory (NZLRI) is a national spatial database of physical land resource information. It comprises an inventory of five physical factors (rock type, soil, slope, present type and severity of erosion, and vegetation). As well as the five physical factors, a number of interpreted products are included: a Land Use Capability (LUC) rating of the ability of each polygon to sustain agricultural production, Derived Fundamental Data Layers (FDLs) and Fundamental soil layers (FSL) which contain data for 16 key soil attributes nationally. There are about 100,000 polygons (map units) within the NZLRI. The NZLRI is a powerful tool as it provides consistent coverage across the entire country at a nominal scale of 1:50 000. This scale is likely to be too coarse for use in farm-planning activities. For finer resolution soil and land resource data investigate the Manaaki Whenua Landcare Research S-Map data. Information about and access to S-map data is available through this site.