Legally Protected Areas for Indigenous Biodiversity
Of New Zealand's total area of 26,209,053 hectares, 8,210,570 hectares (31.3% of the total) are formally protected. This can be broken down into:
- 8,064,290 ha in public conservation land managed by the Department of Conservation (DoC) (30.7% of New Zealand's total area)
- 146,280 ha in QEII, Nga Whenua Rahui and DoC covenants on private land (0.6% of New Zealand's total area). (Note this does not include the 18,724 ha approved but waiting to be covenanted by Queen Elizabeth II Trust.)
We have tried to assess the extent to which the full range of ecosystems are legally protected. We know that active management contributes to biodiversity outcomes even if the land is not legally protected. However at the national level we do not have information about biodiversity conservation activities on unprotected land so we were unable to capture this in our assessment.
Two tools were used to make this assessment. Land Environments of New Zealand (LENZ) and the Land Cover Database (see Appendix 1 for details). LENZ classifies and maps areas (called environments) that have similar environmental or ecosystem character using information likely to influence the distribution of species groups (including climate, landform and soils). The Land Cover Database is a satellite image that has been used to classify and map New Zealand's land cover (eg. urban, mines, wetlands, indigenous forest).
Extent of indigenous vegetation remaining
We used the Land Cover Database to identify areas of indigenous vegetation and assess the extent of indigenous vegetation remaining in each of the LENZ environments. We found that of 100 different land environments across New Zealand, 37 have less than 20% of their total area remaining in indigenous vegetation (see Appendix 1, Table iii for details). Of these 37 environments, 24 have less than 10% of their total area remaining in indigenous vegetation.
We can use LENZ to identify the indigenous vegetation that could occur in an environment. The Land Cover Database does not allow us to do this because the current vegetation may not be the same as what occurred prior to human settlement. Tables ii, Appendix 1, provides a description of the ecosystem character (potential indigenous vegetation) for the 37 environments and where they are found, eg. lowlands, coastal plains and river valleys with some in low to moderate elevation hill country.
Extent of legal protection
By overlaying legally protected areas onto the information from LENZ and the Land Cover Database we examined how much remaining indigenous vegetation is protected. Table iii in Appendix 1 gives these details for each of the 100 LENZ environments. Figure 3 shows this for the 37 environments with less than 10% and less than 20% of indigenous vegetation remaining. Only one of these environments has more than 10% (11.8%) of its original extent under legal protection.
Figure 3: Extent of legal protection for the 37 LENZ Level II environments with up to 10% and from 10 to 20% indigenous vegetation remaining
Figure 4 below shows the location and full extent of the 37 environment with less than 20% of their total area remaining in indigenous vegetation. It also shows areas of indigenous vegetation remaining and those which are legally protected. Table i in Appendix 1 shows the regions where each of the 37 environments is found. Every region has some proportion of the 37 LENZ environments.
Figure 4: Location of the 37 LENZ Level II environments with less that 20% indigenous vegetation remaining, showing areas of legal protection
Contribution of covenants on private land
By overlaying the legally protected areas data onto the LENZ classification we can show that New Zealand's environments are not fully represented on public conservation land. Almost half of the public conservation land managed by DoC occurs in two mountainous environments P and R (refer to Map 1, Appendix 1) that together comprise slightly less than 20% of New Zealand's total area. By contrast coastal plains, and lowland and hill country environments are poorly represented in public conservation land. QEII, Nga Whenua Rahui and DoC covenants on private land cover 0.6% of New Zealand's total area and often protect the environments that are under-represented in public conservation lands. For this reason they make an important contribution to New Zealand's effort to maintain and restore a full range of remaining natural habitats and ecosystems, for example, 50% of the current protection for three land environments (B1, B5 (dry hill country in central New Zealand), G6 (lowlands of the northern two-thirds of the North Island) is on private land (see Table iii Appendix 1 for details).
Overall, this assessment of legally protected areas for indigenous biodiversity show that there are a number of environments where further conservation effort is needed if we are to achieve the New Zealand Biodiversity Strategy goal to maintain and restore the full range of remaining natural habitats and ecosystems.
