The 12,247 sq km Bay of Plenty region extends from Pōtikirua in the east, to Waihi Beach in the west. Inland, the region is mostly bounded by the watersheds of the river catchments that flow into Te Moana-a-Toi, the Bay of Plenty, and includes the Rotorua lakes. Forestry and exotic pasture cover most of the region (69% and 21%, respectively), dominated by the large production forests of the Kāingaroa Plateau, the indigenous forests of Te Urewera National Park, and large tracts of high-producing farmland in the river plains, surrounding the lakes, and near the coast. Just under 50% of the region is covered by indigenous forest, scrub-, and shrub-land. The Bay of Plenty is also home to unique species and ecosystems, including its own variety of kanuka at Thornton, the only known mainland populations of the native broom Carmichaelia williamsii, and most of New Zealand’s monoao-dominated frost flats on the central plateau. The region’s volcanic ash soils are particularly susceptible to erosion if they have insufficient vegetation cover. The Ministry for the Environment has identified 680,000ha of land in the Bay of Plenty that could be potentially at risk from erosion. About 20 percent (153,000 ha) of this land is currently used for pastoral farming.
Bay of Plenty’s land cover profile is characterised by:
The key changes in land cover between 1996 and 2018 in the Bay of Plenty are:
The likely drivers and potential implications of the changes are: