Toitū Te Whenua Land Information New Zealand, the government agency tasked with understanding, developing, and caring for the whenua (land), moana (oceans), and arawai (waterways), is making 20TB of aerial imagery freely available to the public on the cloud with support from Amazon Web Services (AWS). This includes approximately 400,000 images taken recently and dating back to the late 1970s of the country’s landscape, including high-resolution urban imagery, imagery flown for emergency response, and decades of rural-scale aerial imagery. Historic images of forestry and farmland have been georeferenced and ‘stitched together’ through a project funded by the Ministry for Primary Industries to show rural New Zealand in a new light.
Users from around the world, including scientists, researchers, and governments, can now access all of these images through the Registry of Open Data on AWS with support from the AWS Open Data Sponsorship Program, which covers the cost of storage for publicly available high-value, cloud-optimised datasets. This innovative program helps organisations democratise access to their data by making it easily and freely available on AWS. This initiative also encourages the development of communities that benefit from access to shared datasets while reducing costs. Toitū Te Whenua will add more imagery as new data becomes available from central and local government-procured surveys, while the historic imagery will eventually extend back to the 1940s.
The AWS Open Data Sponsorship Program supports Toitū Te Whenua’s mission to collect, manage and make critical geospatial and property datasets available to all. By extending access of these images from the LINZ Data Service to AWS, Toitū Te Whenua has reduced the time it takes for bulk retrieval of aerial data from several weeks to just one day and made it easier for people and organisations to access and analyse the data without waiting to download it first.
“As technology improves, aerial imagery is being captured at higher resolutions over larger areas, and storing, processing, and analysing these images becomes more challenging. We now have more than 20 individual surveys over 500GB in size, including high-resolution imagery covering 95% of the motu,” said Aaron Jordan, Toitū Te Whenua Head of Location Information. “When users are looking for bulk access to these massive files, we’ve previously either had to split them into multiple downloads or courier hard drives around the country. Making the data available through the cloud puts the user in the driver’s seat – they’ll have instant access to it whenever they want. Regional and local councils have gathered this data over many years and it’s invaluable for understanding how the land has changed.”
The agency uses secure encryption to provide high security for sending and receiving file transfers to upload the data to AWS. Once the information is on AWS, Toitū Te Whenua uses a range of AWS services including storage, container applications, serverless compute services, and Amazon CloudFront, a fast content delivery network (CDN) service to manage the data.
