Tracking
Down
Information About Your Property
Originally
Published
in Nelson Marlborough Farming February
2011
Prior to 2001
Land Information New Zealand, the government
agency tasked with maintaining our
land records, had offices in Hokitika,
Nelson and Blenheim which provided a low cost
and convenient service to land owners in
our region. Since then the service has been
“centralised” to Christchurch and the
paper records (old plans, titles and the
such) have been captured digitally in a system
called landonline.
The loss of
the government land information offices
locally has meant that title and survey plans
can only be obtained from those
professionals who can access
Landonline, and your surveyor or lawyer is now
often the best source of current
titles and survey plans.
The loss of
these local offices has, to a certain degree,
been offset by the varied uses the spatial
data that Land Information New Zealand
has generated from the paper records can be
put to. This data can be used to form the the
basis of GIS (geographic information
systems) that are used in recording and
supplying land information. In
recent times councils have adopted this GIS
technology with some enthusiasm and many
have made their GIS systems
available to the public online for free.
Available on council websites are
aerial photographs, property and road
boundaries, information on services and
an abundance of other data.
The West
Coast councils seem to have been slow to adopt
this technology but Nelson/Tasman has
a website www.topofthesouthmaps.co.nz,
and Marlborough provides a service at
gis.marlborough.govt.nz/DekhoPublic . While
the detail on the aerial photographs is
generally good it can be patchy in
some of the remote areas.
For those who
live in an areas such as the West Coast where
the local councils have not made this data
available online google earth (
earth.google.com ) has some basic aerial
photographs with reasonable definition,
but without the boundaries shown.
To
professionals working in planning and
surveying these GIS systems have become an
essential tool however the maps and
aerial photographs also have significant
potential for use as a land management
tool for the individual farmer. The
resolution of many of these areal photographs
are such that fences, crop pattens,
watercourses, buildings etc. can be
identified, and areas and/or distances
measured using the tools provided.
In years gone
by the rural landowner to obtain this sort of
information needed, at some cost, to
purchase aerial photographs from an
aerial photography company, or engage a
surveyor, now this information
is available for free, in colour and
instantaneously from the web. For those
without internet access Councils will
provide printouts of the data for a nominal
charge.
Another use
of council GIS is the ability to
view the aerial photographs and the property
boundaries at the same time giving an
indication of where the actual boundaries are
in relation to features on the ground..
The accuracy of this overlay is not
always perfect and the boundary positions can
only be regarded as indicative.
Where the
position of the boundary is critical (for
example when a fence, or building is to
be constructed) the exact boundary should
be located on the ground from official survey
marks, or a surveyor engaged if there
is any doubt.
This article
is general in nature and should not be a
substitute for specific advice from a
suitable professional. John Cotton
specialises in rural survey and is a Director
of Cotton and Light Ltd a survey firm that
works throughout Nelson, West Coast and
Marlborough.
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