Department of Conservation

Department of Conservation / Te Papa Atawhai (DOC) is a New Zealand government department that manages  over 33% of the country's land. DOC also manages 1000 backcountry huts, and over 200 campsites.

DOC has released some of its data under the CC BY 3.0 license. It was originally made available under the Official Information Act. This data can now be downloaded from the DOC Open Data Portal.

Data Attribution

An email request was made to DOC on 18 June 2009 via the web enquiry form given on their 'Contact us' web page. The question was asked:

Under the CC Licence the creator has to be attributed. I would propose doing this by adding a upload tag, like "DOC data under CC Licence". I'm not asking DOC to endorse this, but merely asking if DOC has strong objections to this proposal (i.e. The intention is to behave in a way that will not be offensive to either DOC or Open Street Map).

A DOC spokesperson replied the following day with the following clarification:

Thanks for your enquiry. Attached is the general disclaimer that must be displayed with the track dataset. I have also included the metadata which explains a how the track information is created and maintained. These tracks are collected as asset information for DOC's internal systems and the data was supplied to Koordinates from an official information request. So DOC's only concern is that the general disclaimer is provided with the track data. I hope I have provided clarification for you, if you have any questions or would like to discuss please call or email me.

The DOC general disclaimer has been added to the Contributors page, as requested. It is suggested that uploads of this DOC data to OSM provide a link to this page in the upload history tag.

DOC Metadata and General Disclaimer

Spatial Representation of the Department Of Conservation's Assets - Tracks

The tracks fall on public conservation land managed by DOC. They are assets managed by the Department. The Asset Management Information System (AMIS) database provides attribute information of the tracks. The spatial extent of the tracks is maintained by DOC's conservancy staff and held in a national geodatabase.

The spatial data is captured by 6 different methods

1) Differential GPS data capture with infill of missing points

2) GPS data capture with infill of missing points

3) Digitised from aerial photography (hardcopy)

4) Digitised from aerial photography (scanned)

5) LINZ 50k topographical data

6) Digitised from LINZ MZMS 260 map images

Result of Official Information Act request

This data was provided by DoC under the New Zealand Official Information Act.

Conditions of use

The information and data are provided as a public service by the Department of Conservation (DOC) under the following conditions:

1) The information supplied is provided for general information only.

2) The Department of Conservation makes no claims, promises or guarantees as to the accuracy or completeness of the information, or its suitability for any purpose.

3) The Department of Conservation does not accept any liability for the content and shall not be responsible or liable for any claims of any kind arising from the use of the information.

4) The Crown (through the Department of Conservation) remains the sole owner of the intellectual property in the information on this disk.

Datasets

Dataset	Feature Count	Status in OSM	Tagging
Huts	938	Y Imported in 2018, updated in 2022, and continously refined by mappers	See #Huts below
Lodges	19	Y All have been manually mapped	See #Lodges below
Campsites	280	Y About 30 missing campsites imported in 2022, all others were already mapped	See #Campsites below
Tracks	3,254	Many tracks have been mapped using other data sources, not DOC.	See #Tracks below
Protected Areas	10,958	Very few are mapped, only national parks.	See #Protected Areas below

All feautures imported from DOC have a ref:doc=* tag. This value can be used to lookup information about that feature using DOC's API. This tag also enables data in OSM to be easily compared/conflated with the latest data from DOC.

Huts

Huts were first imported in 2018. This data was updated in 2022, at the same time as non-DOC huts were imported from LINZ. (see here for details). This data has been continously refined by mappers. Example Hut Example Hut.

Huts were imported as Nodes, but it is preferable to map the buildings as an Area.

Tagging:

• tourism=wilderness_hut
• operator=Department of Conservation + operator:wikidata=Q1191417
• name=*
• ref:doc=*
• ref:linz:topo50_id=* (added by the LINZ data import)
• website=*
• reservation=required/no
• mattress=yes/no
• fireplace=yes/no
• drinking_water=yes/untreated/no
• lit=yes/no
• toilets=yes/no + toilets:disposal=flush/pitlatrine

Lodges

Lodges are not available from DOC's GIS portal, nor from their v2 developer API. All lodges have all been mapped. Example lodge Example lodge.

Tagging:

• tourism=wilderness_hut (or other tag)
• operator=Department of Conservation + operator:wikidata=Q1191417
• name=*
• ref:doc=*
• website=*

Campsites

About 30 missing campsites imported in 2022, all others were already mapped. In 2022 many campsites were converted from Nodes to Areas, and additional tag were added. Example Campsite Example Campsite.

Tagging:

• tourism=camp_site
• operator=Department of Conservation + operator:wikidata=Q1191417
• name=*
• ref:doc=*
• website=*
• wheelchair=yes/limited/no
• capacity:tents=*
• capacity:caravans=*
• backcountry=yes/(blank)
• toilets=yes/no + toilets:disposal=flush/pitlatrine
• The remaining tags are only present on some campsites
  • power_supply=yes/no
  • sanitary_dump_station=yes/no
  • shower=hot/cold/no
  • kitchen=yes/no
  • shelter=yes/no
  • reservation=required/no
  • dog=no/leashed/unleashed/permit
  • drinking_water=yes/untreated/no

Tracks

Many tracks are already mapped, based on aerial imagery, OpenStreetMap GPS traces, or surveys.

As of Febuary 2022, there has been no attempt to import these feaures from DOC.

Protected Areas

DOC's Protected Areas dataset is from the NaPALIS system, so the same data is also available from LINZ.

As of Febuary 2022, there has been no coordinated attempt to map or import these features, besides from the 13 National Parks.

Discardable Tags

Previous imports added some obsolete tags which can safely be discarded:

• operator:wikipedia=*
• description=*

See Also

• New Zealand
• LINZ
• The code used to update huts and campsites in 2022