When to use it

You need site contours for a concept plan, a driveway, drainage or a landscape design.
You want contours snapped to a property boundary instead of a whole map sheet.
The 20 m contours on the topographic map are too coarse for the question.

How to use it

Select a property, draw an area or upload a boundary.
Choose the contour interval. Finer intervals mean more lines and a bigger file.
Generate. Contours appear on the map with height labels you can toggle.
Pick an export format and download.

How it works

The 1 m LiDAR bare-earth model is loaded for the area and traced at each contour height. Fragments are stitched into continuous lines, simplified slightly so the files stay usable, and labelled with their height.

The output resolution follows the size of the area: a building site is traced at full 1 m detail, while a 12 km block is resampled to roughly 12 m per pixel before tracing.

Reading the results

Closely spaced lines mean steep ground; wide spacing means flat. A closed ring with no lines inside is a knoll or a hollow.

Every export names the LiDAR survey and its licensor, which you must credit if you publish the contours.

Limits and warnings

Areas up to 12 km across.
Contours below about 2 m interval are only meaningful on 1 m LiDAR. On the 8 m fallback they trace interpolation, not ground.
The terrain is a snapshot from the LiDAR capture date. Earthworks since then are not shown.

Data and attribution

Results come from the LINZ national 1 m LiDAR bare-earth elevation model, read in your browser, with the national 8 m model filling any gaps. Tools that use the surface model (Sunlight, Viewshed, Object Heights) read the matching LiDAR surface tiles.

Elevation and cadastral data is sourced from the LINZ Data Service and licensed for re-use under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence. Copyright in each LiDAR survey belongs to the body that commissioned it — a regional or district council, Waka Kotahi, NIWA and around thirty others — rather than to LINZ, which hosts and processes the national dataset. Every file exported from this site names the licensors whose surveys cover the area, and anything you publish from those files carries the same attribution requirement. See https://www.linz.govt.nz/products-services/data/licensing-and-using-data/attributing-elevation-or-aerial-imagery-data

Download Data — Exports the terrain for your area as contour vectors, a GeoTIFF elevation raster or a 3D surface mesh for printing and rendering.
Slope & Aspect — Maps how steep every part of your area is and which compass direction each face points, with a full breakdown of slope classes and aspect shares.
Terrain Stats — Summarises the minimum, maximum, mean and range of ground elevation across an area, with a chart of how much land sits at each height.
Property — Selects the legal parcel under your click and uses its real boundary as the analysis area for every other tool.

Guides

Contour Lines