Terrain · Select a property, draw a box or polygon, or upload a boundary
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.
When to use it
- You want the highest and lowest points on a property, or the elevation of a house site.
- You need the elevation range for a flood, frost or planting question.
- You want the ground elevation, not the height of what is standing on it.
How to use it
- Select a property, draw an area or upload a boundary.
- Run. The panel lists the statistics and draws the elevation distribution.
How it works
Every cell of the 1 m LiDAR bare-earth model inside the area is read, and the statistics are taken over those cells. The distribution chart, called a hypsometric curve, bins the cells by elevation so you can see whether the land is mostly high, mostly low or evenly spread.
Reading the results
Elevations are metres above the LiDAR vertical datum, which is close to mean sea level.
A long thin distribution means a steady slope; a tall spike means mostly flat ground at one height.
Limits and warnings
- Areas up to 6 km across.
- 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.
- Bare ground only. For roof and tree heights use Object Heights.
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
Ready to try it?
Open Terrain Stats on the map →Free, no account. Runs in your browser on LINZ open data.