4 posts tagged with "LINZ"

Māori GIS is not simply Western GIS blended with a layer of tikanga or Māori terminology. It begins with kaupapa, people and relationships to whenua, wai, moana and place. GIS is one tool that iwi, hapū, whānau and Māori organisations can choose and adapt for planning, kaitiakitanga, environmental mahi, historical research, Treaty work, ingoa wāhi, communication and many other purposes.

That means a useful Māori GIS resource list is not just a catalogue of software and datasets. The better question is whether the tools increase practical choice, support rangatiratanga over information and reduce unnecessary dependence on an outside specialist or platform. A free dataset is useful if people can understand it. A powerful application is useful if it serves the kaupapa. A cloud service is useful if the people responsible for the information are comfortable with where that information goes and can move it elsewhere later.

The resources below include public data and software. They are useful tools, not the source of Māori authority over the places being mapped.

Basemaps are the background layers that help you read your data in context. In Māori GIS work they often sit behind decisions about whenua, taiao, access, planning and change over time. They can also carry risk because high-detail imagery can reveal more than you intended to share.

A basemap is not simply a technical background. It quietly tells the reader what the map considers normal and important. A road map puts roads first. A cadastral background makes parcel boundaries feel fundamental. A satellite image privileges what can be seen from above. None of these is necessarily wrong, but the choice affects how the whenua is read. A kaupapa concerned with awa, maunga, historic occupation or taiao may need a very different background from a property or infrastructure map.

This post covers the main basemap options used in Aotearoa, how WMTS tiles work, how imagery is updated and how to add these basemaps into QGIS, ArcGIS Online and other tools.

One of the most common sources of confusion in Māori GIS work is land and property data. Several state and local-government systems represent land differently, and none of them should be mistaken for a complete representation of whenua. A cadastral layer is exceptionally useful for legal and survey questions, but its clean polygons can easily become the dominant visual language of a map and make everything else look secondary.

For Māori GIS, it is often more useful to begin the other way around. Start with the kaupapa and the relationship to whenua, then bring parcel, title, rating, Crown and Māori Land Court information into the picture for the questions those systems can genuinely answer. The state geometry may be necessary because iwi, hapū, whānau and Māori landowners have to work with Crown and council systems, but using those boundaries does not require accepting them as the only meaningful way to understand the land.

This post explains the main parcel and property datasets available through LINZ, what they are designed to represent, and how to use them without allowing legal property geometry to become the unquestioned base truth for Māori mapping.

One of the most useful tools for understanding physical change in whenua over time is historical aerial photography. In Aotearoa, the easiest public way to explore much of this imagery is through Retrolens. The photographs can show rivers before they were straightened, wetlands before drainage, roads before widening, forests before clearance or planting, coastlines before reclamation and settlements before later development.

For Māori GIS, however, the value of historical imagery is not that an aerial photograph somehow reveals the complete truth of a place. It is one view, captured from above at a particular moment for a particular survey purpose. It can sit alongside kōrero tuku iho, whānau memory, historical records, maps and knowledge held by people connected to the whenua. Sometimes a photograph confirms something remembered locally. Sometimes it raises a new question. Sometimes it shows physical change without explaining why that change happened or what it meant to the people living there.

Retrolens provides access to scanned aerial photos dating from the mid-1930s through to the late 1980s. This period covers enormous change in land use, drainage, forestry, farming, road construction, river modification and urban expansion. Used carefully, these images can help reconnect documentary records and present-day geography with landscapes that have since been altered.