Five urban catchments in the Greater Sydney region of Australia were selected as sample catchments; each of the selected catchments contained different combinations of land zones with the urban planning legislation foundation of NSW, Australia. Figure 1 shows the location of these five urban catchments. Details of catchment names and areas are provided in Table 1. A common characteristic of the five urbanised catchments is heterogeneous LULC, which reflects similar LULC but different distribution patterns. As mixed land zoning catchments, all of the study catchments consist of various types of ground truth features, including houses, terraces, apartments, shopping centres, factories, sports fields and urban landscapes. The concentrated distribution of functional structures can be detected from the high-resolution remote sensing imagery of the five catchments, which means they have experienced or are experiencing land zoning and re-zoning development. In addition, the heterogeneous LULC of the study catchments will lead to difficulty in identifying and interpreting LULC information from the remote sensing imagery, while using a land zoning map to group land use by functional attribute can significantly enlarge the sample amount and hence increase the robustness of the statistical model (Jiang 2010).