Land cover (LC) and land use (LU) changes often indicate major impacts on biodiversity especially if those changes show the loss of natural habitat due to urban sprawl, cultivation, etc. Spatial LC/LU patterns often form a reference for applications ranging from monitoring, planning, biodiversity, climate change, etc. In the past, existing national products LC/LU changes have been widely used in different applications and projects. Most of these applications and projects used the National Land Cover project of 2000 (NLC 2000) published in 2005 and was created to update the first national land cover of 1994 (NLC 1994) published in 1996. Due to the rather outdated information on land cover, there is high demand for improved land cover data sets on a national scale.

The National Land Cover of 2000 (NLC 2000), officially published in 2005, is completely outdated since it was based on original data of 2000. Since then a lot of changes that have occurred on the ground. In the meantime some provinces and municipalities have already produced finer scale land cover (LC) and/or land use (LU) data products. In addition an impressive list of national data products on LC and LU has been produced and become available through several state and parastatal institutions. Therefore this project looks into harmonizing the best available data sets to update LC/LU information given by NLC 2000. On the downside this project has to make use of NLC 2000 as a base layer still where provinces municipalities or other institutions could not provide updated information on LC or LU. Merging of spatial information sources described in this document is set to follow a standardized harmonization process ensuring spatial compatibility and thematic comparability among the different data sets.

The final data product will be used for the NSBA (National Spatial Biodiversity Assessment) 2010 and will also be used to calculate indicator statistics for SANBI’s Biodiversity Monitoring Programme. In addition, it will be utilized to calibrate models helping SANBI to update LC/LU data on an ongoing basis.

Note: This map is available for download, but it requires registration with the site for tracking purposes. All rights on the landcover dataset are retained by Ezemvelo KwaZulu-Natal Wildlife. The map is in raster format.