Tree Canopy Cover in Wellington City and Suburbs, New Zealand
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Tree canopy cover (TCC) is an important way of describing urban forests and is necessary to assess the ecosystem services they provide. Tree canopy cover was estimated for Wellington City and Suburbs using an object-based image analysis (OBIA) approach, followed by manual correction. The OBIA was based on aerial orthophotography and LiDAR data acquired over Wellington between 2017 and 2020. The tree canopy cover assessment that was completed for this report should be considered accurate as at 20 March 2019, the date of the earliest LiDAR data acquisition. Overall tree canopy cover in Wellington City and Suburbs is 30.61%. Tree cover in wards ranges from approximately 20 – 47%, while in suburbs it ranges from a low 1% in Rongotai to a high of 71% in Highbury. Two-thirds of the suburbs in the study area have tree cover ranging between 10 – 40%. Only two suburbs (5% of suburbs) have tree cover greater than 50%, while 6 (14% of suburbs) have tree cover less than 10%. The accuracy of the classification is 98.36%.