A government-backed mapping project will chart every commercial forest in New Zealand down to a single hectare, sorting plantations by species and age in a database built for the country’s small woodlot owners. That is according to Te Uru Rakau, the government forestry agency, which earlier this year signed a contract with a consortium to produce the spatial database.
Built on machine learning and LiDAR, the system can pick out species beyond radiata pine and estimate the height and age of a stand from the air. It reads crop type and exact area across the smaller titles that earlier AI mapping work flagged as a blind spot in the national picture.
The contract comes as foresters and processors look beyond pine for species that fetch higher returns, even where scattered smallholdings make the critical mass those species need hard to reach. Districts have lacked the data to match growers to a common crop, a shortfall the new database is meant to close.
Graham West, a Rotorua farm forester and past president of the New Zealand Farm Forestry Association, said the satellite-based system would far surpass earlier efforts to gauge crop type and exact area. Large estates already lodge their planting figures with the national survey, but “we do not have an accurate picture of what they are growing,” West said of smaller growers.
Last year’s national exotic forest survey showed that much of the plantation estate is in smallholdings, with almost a quarter of a million hectares held in titles of less than 40 hectares. That share trails only the 1.1 million hectares held in estates of 10,000 hectares or more, out of 1.8 million hectares of exotic forest nationally.
The Central North Island holds the largest concentration of those small woodlots, at 58,000 hectares, much of it beyond the reach of the big firms that feed the national count. West has drawn on forest grower levy funds to develop Treefarmer, a support programme for smaller-scale growers, with an early build already folding in Hawke’s Bay.
For an owner weighing an alternative to pine, West said, a clear view of what already grows nearby lets a grower pick species around what the district has already planted. Knowledge of species and stand age could also let neighbouring woodlot owners share felling costs when their crops mature together.
Motueka farm forester Roger May told Farmers Weekly the tool was vital if New Zealand were to move past low-value raw pine exports and grow its higher-value timbers. “We had $2.8 billion of forestry imports last year,” May said.
Those imports ran at close to half the value of the country’s forestry exports, May said, with roughly $150 million of the total made up of special-purpose timber. Pinpointing where high-value species already grow, he argued, was central to expanding the planted area and sharpening the sector’s efficiency.
