New Zealand Aerial and Satellite Imagery with Historical Coverage

A collection of New Zealand's publicly owned aerial and satellite imagery, ranging from 5cm resolution in urban areas to lower-resolution full national coverage. The dataset includes historical imagery scanned from film, orthorectified, and georeferenced, provided as Cloud Optimised GeoTIFFs with STAC metadata. It is published by Toitū Te Whenua Land Information New Zealand under a CC-BY-4.0 license.

Use Cases

• Conduct land cover and land use change analysis based on the historical imagery record.
• Train computer vision models for object detection using high-resolution (5cm) urban imagery.
• Perform geospatial analysis and mapping using the full-coverage, orthorectified imagery.
• Develop time-series models of landscape evolution based on the multi-temporal imagery.

Strengths

• Includes very high-resolution imagery down to 5cm in some urban areas.
• Provides full coverage of mainland New Zealand, the Chathams, and offshore islands.
• Contains a unique historical record with imagery scanned from film, orthorectified, and georeferenced.
• Files are Cloud Optimised GeoTIFFs with STAC metadata for efficient access.

Limitations

• Row count and total dataset size are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Column-level documentation is absent; specific image attributes must be inferred from metadata after download.
• Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.

Provenance

Source

Toitū Te Whenua Land Information New Zealand

Collection Method

Publicly owned aerial and satellite imagery, with historical imagery scanned from film.

Time Range

null

Freshness

null

Geography

Mainland New Zealand, Chatham Islands, and other offshore islands.