The project entitled “Physiographics of Southland” is a remarkable achievement in interdisciplinary water quality research.  The underlying objective is to provide a better scientific basis for land-use planning rules and their maps.  Just because of the data-intensive work using state-of-the-art GIS, the project is laudable.  What is more significant is its use of a large amount of research-quality data to identify mechanisms that control surface water and shallow groundwater quality, and not simply use the data for some form of black-box statistical analysis.