NZ Elevation ToolsOpen Terrain Stats on the map →

Terrain · Select a property, draw a box or polygon, or upload a boundary

Elevation statistics for any New Zealand property

Find the elevation of your property: the highest and lowest ground, the mean and the range, measured over every cell of the tool’s grid inside the title, read from the LINZ elevation tiles at their finest detail for small areas and coarser for large ones. A chart shows how much of the land sits at each height.

Handy for flood, frost and planting questions, and for knowing how far above sea level a house site really is.

Terrain Stats results: area, minimum, maximum, mean, relief and mean slope
Terrain Stats on Mt Iron, Wānaka. The walkthrough below shows how this was made.

Free to run · pay to download

Free to run, and free to save as a PNG image of the map. This tool has no file export of its own. For the terrain as a file, Download Data exports contours, a GeoTIFF or a 3D mesh with a pass: NZ$49 for 7 days or NZ$299 for 12 months.

Open Terrain Stats on the map →Pass prices and what’s included

Who uses this

  • Owners and buyers. Know how high the section sits, for flood and sea-level questions.
  • Growers. Find the frost-prone low ground and the height band of a block.

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.

Which tool for your job

Terrain Stats is one step in a bigger question. These are the jobs it helps with, and the tools that go with it.

If you’re working on plans, cad, gis and 3d printing

I need the terrain as a file.

  1. 1.Data Here — Which LiDAR, coastal and aerial photo surveys cover a spot, and when each was flown.
  2. 2.Download Data — Contours, a GeoTIFF elevation model, a 3D DXF or LandXML ground surface, or a 3D mesh for printing.
  3. 3.Contour Lines — Contours previewed on the map before you export them.
  4. 4.Elevate a File — Adds ground elevation to your own GPX, KML, GeoJSON or CSV points.
  5. 5.Point Elevation — Spot heights at the points you click, for a floor level or a tank, or on a grid across a section, to download.
  6. 6.Terrain Stats (this tool) — The highest, lowest and mean ground height of an area, and how the land is spread between them.

How to use it

  1. Select a property, draw an area or upload a boundary.
  2. Run. The panel lists the statistics and draws the elevation distribution.

Step by step: Mt Iron, Wānaka

We summarise the height of the ground across 94 ha of Mt Iron.

Terrain Stats panel with an area box over Mt Iron
1.Frame the area or select a property, then Compute Stats.
Terrain Stats results: area, minimum, maximum, mean, relief and mean slope
2.Over 93.6 ha the ground runs from 315 m to 519 m, a relief of 205 m, with a mean height of 410 m and a mean slope of 16.4°.

What it showed

  • Heights are above the LiDAR datum, close to mean sea level. For the height of trees and roofs use Object Heights.

Screenshots from NZ Elevation Tools. Aerial imagery from LINZ Basemaps. Sourced from the LINZ Data Service and licensed by Environment Southland, Otago Regional Council and Queenstown-Lakes District Council for re-use under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence.

Try it on Mt Iron, Wānaka →

How it works

Every cell of the tool's bare-earth grid inside the area is read, at the tiles’ finest detail (cells of about 0.5 m) for small areas and coarser for large ones, 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 LINZ elevation tiles hold the national 8 m elevation model instead. It was interpolated from 20 m map contours and is not fit for site-scale decisions. The on-map result does not say which one it read: Data Here shows whether LiDAR covers a spot.
  • Bare ground only. For roof and tree heights use Object Heights.

Data and attribution

Heights come from the LINZ elevation tiles: LINZ’s national bare-earth elevation model (LiDAR where it has been flown, the 8 m model elsewhere), stored in 0.1 m steps, read in your browser at the finest zoom that fits the area: cells of about 0.5 m on a small area, coarser on a larger one. Over the sea the tiles read 0 m; they hold no seabed.

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

Questions

Is the elevation above sea level?

It is metres above the LiDAR vertical datum, which is close to mean sea level. For design levels, check against a survey benchmark.

Ready to try it?

Open Terrain Stats on the map →

Free to use, no account. Runs in your browser on LINZ open data.

Missing something you need? Suggest a feature or ask about custom work.