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Strategy lead and senior scientist at Agresearch Robyn Dynes says questions about what will grow well, where, prompted the development of the ‘data supermarket’
A new “data supermarket” produced by researchers from a number of New Zealand institutions is designed to help growers plan what types of crops they can grow as the climate changes, what impact crops will have on the environment, and plan for land use change.
Strategy lead and senior scientist at Agresearch Robyn Dynes said in future there would be more land use change driven by market opportunities, a changing climate and regulatory requirements.
“What we’re doing now won’t be fit for purpose into the future in some of our landscapes,” Dynes said.
There was a lot of data available through different government agencies, but data needed to be in one place, transparent and the limitations of the data needed to be known, she said.
Landowners or farmers could use the data supermarket when they considered land use change, she said.
The data was presented in a technical format and would be used by, for example, a farmer, farm consultant or bank with knowledge of geographic information systems (GIS).
GIS systems were used to analyse maps and geographic information.
Researchers were developing a more user-friendly platform for the data that would be available in future, Dynes said.
Data would be used as the base of a plan to inform decisions around land use change, however landowners who wanted to do due diligence needed to use a local expert who could do in-depth soil analysis and who understood a region’s microclimates before they committed to specific land uses changes, she said.
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A new data supermarket will allow growers and farmers to make decisions on land use change by allowing access to information that will show them what crops can be grown now and in future in specific areas.
The data supermarket could be used to provide banks with verified data for a business plan and to show that, for example, a grower considered all the relevant information about what crops would be financially viable on a certain piece of land now and in future, Dynes said.
The data supermarket included diverse data, such as the impact of a land use change on air quality or what type of labour was needed for a specific type of crop, she said.
More data was continually added on as the supermarket was fine-tuned, Dynes said.
The data could help growers and farmers help make decisions towards a lower carbon future, she said.
The data supermarket was open to anyone and was free.
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In future there would be more land use change driven by market opportunities, a changing climate and regulatory requirements and farmers and growers needed to have the right information to make decisions about land use.
The datasets were created between 2020 and 2023.
Each dataset included information about its limitations and how the data was produced, and most included GIS layers.
Data was open-access and could be downloaded for use in third-party tools.
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