New Zealand

Much of the following descriptions come from contact Alastair Jamieson at the Auckland Regional Council.

Projection

• the most common projection used is the New Zealand Map Grid (NZMG)
  • truly unique - "the projection is conformal, but is otherwise unlike any other projection used for mapping."

Apps

• TUMONZ - The Ultimate Map of New Zealand
  • see Location-specific Software Packages

Source Data

• GeographX has some free data
  • including DEMs down to 250m and a shaded relief w/landcover
  • also have reasonably priced DEMs down to 20m
  • also sell a number of interesting derived products including 3D Maps for use with the K2Vi 3D Viewer
• The main government source for topographic and survey information is 'Land Information New Zealand' (LINZ).
  • The site includes large, detailed, downloadable, black and white aerial photos of much of the country, including the major urban areas
  • The topography page offers scanned maps of some of the country's offshore islands, a marvelous terrain map of the whole country drawn with pre-computer methods, and the promise of detailed topographic information online in late 2002.
• A great website to get an idea of the kind of data coverage that is generally available for purchase in New Zealand, but not yet often available on the web is that of local government agency Whangarei District Council.  Their site contains detailed topographic maps (excellent coverage from the main New Zealand 1:50,000 scale map series), LandSat satellite imagery, aerial photography of towns and cadastral maps for a good portion of northern New Zealand.
• The New Zealand Ministry for the Environment is currently working on a land environments classification project to map the environmental characteristics of the country. The web site for this project has some mapping available now, with more detailed information in the future.
• Toaster NZ
  • standalone application for browsing a collection of NZ topo maps and aerials photos
  • not 3D, but potentially a convenient way to get geospecific images for draping
  • costs NZ$100 to $630 depending on resolution, coverage, and other options
• Landcare Research hold and publish masses of environmental data and maps on the New Zealand environment, which can be obtained through their websites, though not much data is available online. The company also receives color NOAA satellite images ( from NOAA-12, NOAA-14, NOAA-16 and NOAA-17) and uploads them two or three times a day on this website.  This primarily provides weather information, but when the daytime images are not too cloudy a certain amount of landcover detail is visible.
• The Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences produces geological maps for New Zealand, but while their website has some interesting information on several topics (especially volcanoes) there is not a lot of mapping data available online yet.

Derived Data

• The Auckland Regional Council website has a five 'fly-through' VRML views of Auckland volcanoes (using Cosmo Player 2.1.1)
• The New Zealand GeographyNetwork is an ArcIMS server providing image-based browsing of landcover and roads for the whole country

Buildings

• Google 3D Warehouse Cities in Development: Christchurch
• Joel Wilson in Auckland has a project to model the Auckland CBD (downtown).

Cities

• As of 2007, Auckland has a ''Digital Auckland' initiative to attempt to (1) make good broadband widely available and (2) expand people's ability to access (and visualize) digital city data
• "Auckland City Council member Richard Simpson's vision is to create a world-leading "geospatially indexed" web portal for council data and other information about Auckland. The idea revolves around the type of technology initiatives embraced by delegates at last year's international Digital Earth summit, held in Auckland."