Landforms

When to use it

• Reading the shape of a block quickly: where the ridges, gullies and flats are.
• Finding sheltered hollows, exposed ridges or well-drained spurs for planting and stock.
• Understanding drainage and slope stability patterns before a walk-over.

How to use it

1. Select a property, draw an area or upload a boundary.
2. Set the neighbourhood radius in metres. Small radii pick out paddock-scale features; large radii describe the hill as a whole.
3. Run. Each landform has its own colour, and the panel gives each one's share of the area.

How it works

The tool looks out from each cell in eight directions to the chosen radius and records whether the ground rises or falls in each. The pattern of rises and falls is matched to one of ten landform types, a method known as geomorphons.

Reading the results

Ridges and peaks are the high, exposed ground; valleys, hollows and pits collect water; spurs and shoulders are the well-drained slopes between.

The same hillside can read differently at 20 m and 200 m radius. That is expected: landform depends on the scale you look at.

Limits and warnings

• Radius from 5 to 250 m. Areas are sampled more coarsely than contours, so the smallest features can be missed on large areas.
• Where 1 m LiDAR has not been flown the tool falls back to the national 8 m elevation model, and the result says what share came from the fallback. The 8 m model was interpolated from 20 m map contours and is not fit for site-scale decisions.

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

Related

Neighbouring tools

• 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.
• Wetness Map — Maps where the shape of the land tends to concentrate moisture, from how much ground drains to each point and how flat that point is.
• Water & Drainage — Extracts the drainage channels across an area as an ordered stream network, and maps where water would pond once hollows fill, with depth, area and volume.