Toitū Te Whenua Land Information New Zealand datasets
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Māori whānau, hapū and iwi across Aotearoa are increasingly using GIS (geographic information systems) to map their whenua (land), taonga (treasured places) and whakapapa (genealogies). Māori led mapping often blends Western GIS methods with tikanga (customary practice) and mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge). GIS tools help communities present information for resource management, cultural narratives, planning, and evidence for decisions.
Basemaps are the background layers that help you read your data in context. In Māori GIS work, basemaps 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.
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.
A basemap is context, not truth. It helps you see patterns and locate features, but it is not a legal boundary, and it is not always perfectly aligned everywhere.
One of the most common sources of confusion in Māori GIS work is land and property data. Many people assume there is one definitive parcel layer that shows ownership. In reality, there are several layers, each representing something slightly different and some even incomplete.
This post explains the main land and property polygon datasets available through LINZ, what they represent, and how they fit together. It also explains how to identify Crown owned land using the CROSYL dataset.
One of the most useful tools for understanding change in whenua over time is historical aerial photography. In Aotearoa, the easiest public way to explore this imagery is through the Retrolens website.
Retrolens provides access to scanned aerial photos dating from the mid 1930s through to the late 1980s. For Māori GIS work, this period covers major changes in land use, drainage, forestry, farming, road construction, river modification, and urban expansion. It is often the clearest visual record of what existed before modern planning and regulation.