National Databases

Landcare Research's animal distribution maps provide a view of the national distribution of 7 species of deer, 5 species of wallaby, thar, chamois, goat and pig, from 1996 to the present.

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Unpublished reports of animal surveys were produced by previous environmental agencies such as the Wildlife Service (Department of Internal Affairs), New Zealand Forest Service, Ecology Division (DSIR), and more recently by the Department of Conservation, Landcare Research and a range of private contractors. Relevant data from each report including the report title, author(s), purpose of survey, DOC Conservancy, map references (NZMS 260), primary species surveyed, incidental species detected as part of the survey, the methods used, and the number of lines and plots have been compiled and are available on the Landcare Research site.

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The ant distribution database is a searchable tool, hosted by Landcare Research, that contains distribution and collection records for all ant species in New Zealand (native and exotic), as well as global distribution for invasive ant species. Each distribution record is linked to the source information (scientific publications, faunal surveys, and institutional collections). Information sheets and distribution maps are supplied for each species.

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The Auckland Museum has around 392,000 specimen-level terrestrial, freshwater and marine plant and animal records recording locality, date and ecological information for its natural history collections. A limited subset of these records are available at the museum's web site.

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BioWeb is a database system administered by the Department of Conservation that holds data about New Zealand’s natural and historic heritage that is of importance to the Department of Conservation. The national banding scheme keeps records of all birds banded in New Zealand and all recoveries, from the early 1950s to the present.

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BioWeb is a database system administered by the Department of Conservation that holds data about New Zealand’s natural and historic heritage that is of importance to the Department of Conservation. Herpetofauna is the reptile and amphibian database within BioWeb. Herpetofauna contains species taxonomy information, species observation records and marked-animal observation records. Individuals, scientists and museums have been contributing to the NZ Amphibian and Reptile Distribution Scheme (ARDS) data for several decades and these records will be transferred to Herpetofauna.

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BioWeb is a database system administered by the Department of Conservation that holds data about New Zealand’s natural and historic heritage that is of importance to the Department of Conservation. The threatened plants database contains national records of threatened plant species - distribution and abundance, and identification including pictures and alternative names.

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The Canterbury Museum Vertebrate and Invertebrate Zoology Collection Database is a record of Canterbury Museum’s collections including birds, mammals, fish, invertebrates, and subfossil birds and mammals. There are holdings from New Zealand, Australia, Antactica, Europe, USA, South America, Indonesia, New Guinea, and Russia, from 1860 to the present.

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The Ca wthron Institute Culture Collection of Micro-Algae is a nationally significant living collection which contains nine classes of micro-algae. Several species are unique to New Zealand or have properties not found in overseas isolates.

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Massey University's Dame Ella Campbell Herbarium is a collection basically of the native and naturalised flora of New Zealand, with only minor overseas holdings. There is an extensive collection of naturalised (exotic species naturally reproducing in New Zealand), cultivated and agricultural species. The geographic representation focuses on the lower half of the North Island, and the Volcanic Plateau.

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Under developed by the Department of Conservation, 5MBC is a database of five minute bird count data from across New Zealand since 1975. It contains 80,000 counts with an emphasis on older and larger datasets.

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The Forest Monitoring and Assessment Kit (Formak) web site forms part of a monitoring kit designed for immediate use by land owners, landcare groups, community groups and other "hands on" users interested in assessing the condition of New Zealand native forest ecosystems. The FORMAK project was undertaken by PA Handford & Associates Ltd with support from the Sustainable Management Fund, which is administered by the Ministry for the Environment.

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The following NZ Councils successfully use this database.

• Environment Canterbury

The Freshwater Biodata Information System (FBIS) hosted by NIWA contains fish, algae, aquatic plant and invertebrate data and metadata gathered from New Zealand's freshwater streams, rivers and lakes.

FBIS data is also available as a layer on NIWA's Freshwater Information New Zealand GIS system.

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The following NZ Councils successfully use this database.

• Marlborough District Council

Massey University's Guide to New Zealand Soil Invertebrates provides information on New Zealand soil and litter invertebrates, their diversity, biology, ecosystem role, and conservation status. All pages are illustrated with photographs of living animals.

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LENZ, Land Environments of New Zealand, is a classification of New Zealand's terrestrial environments providing information about climate, soils and landforms.

The LENZ classification layers are freely available for public use, licenced by the Ministry for the Environment under a Creative Commons Attribution Licence. The underlying layers and a technical guide are available from Landcare Research.

LENZ is also available in the form of a full colour print atlas available from bookstores (published by David Bateman Ltd, RRP $49.99, ISBN 1-86953-522-7).

The Land Resource Information System (LRIS) is a Nationally Significant Database hosted by Landcare Research. It is made up of the New Zealand Land Resource Inventory (NZLRI), the National Soils Database (NSD) and derivatives (including Fundamental Soil Layers (FSL), digital soil maps, and other spatial databases).

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The Land Use and Carbon Analysis System (LUCAS) is being implemented by the Ministry for the Environment to meet New Zealand’s reporting requirements under the Kyoto Protocol, to allow New Zealand to claim credits for our carbon sinks under the Kyoto Protocol.

LUCAS will enable accounting and reporting of afforestation, reforestation and deforestation. It will be used to manage information relating to land use categories including forest land, croplands, grassland, wetlands, and settlements. LUCAS will calculate the amount of carbon stored in forests and soils and how these carbon stocks change with land use. It will involve reporting for five terrestrial carbon 'pools': Above-ground biomass, Below-ground biomass, Dead wood, Litter and Soil organic matter.

LUCAS will involve a national forest inventory that can be used for biodiversity assessments of indigenous forest and will also provide shrublands and sampling frameworks for regional and local vegetation monitoring.

The Lincoln University Centre of Research Excellence Database is a database of terrestrial and aquatic insects collected for DNA analysis. The purpose of the research was to confidently attach DNA sequence data to individual specimens to facilitate DNA identification methods to meet New Zealand's biosecurity requirements. Exotic and endemic specimens were obtained from within New Zealand and around the world.

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The National Forest Herbarium and its associated database are hosted by Ensis. The Herbarium specialises in vascular plants, particularly trees, and is a Nationally Significant Collection. It holds over 24,000 catalogued specimens, specialising in conifers, eucalypts and species commonly grown as amenity trees. It also acts as the regional herbarium for indigenous and adventive flora of the Bay of Plenty and central North Island of New Zealand.

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The National Vegetation Survey Databank (NVS) is a Nationally Significant Database hosted by Landcare Research that serves as a major information source for understanding and reporting on the status and trends in New Zealand's biodiversity. The databank both a physical archive and computer databank containing records from approximately 45,000 vegetation survey plots spanning more than 50 years, of indigenous and exotic plants in New Zealand's terrestrial ecosystems, from Northland to Stewart Island and the Kermadec and Chatham islands.

The data can be used to describe plant species occurrence and abundance, vegetation structure, and environmental variables over a broad range of habitats and represent over 4 million records across 3,500 separate datasets. The strategic goals for NVS include a strong emphasis on effective and secure data management, databank growth and increase uptake, and increased effectiveness in use. To fulfilling these goals requires state-of-the-art data management of a continually growing resource, leadership in data integration and synthesis, and, anticipating and meeting the needs of end-users.

NVS Lite

NVS Lite is a free tool for entering vegetation data compatible with the NVS databank. It can be downloaded free and run on a Windows PC. NVS Lite accepts data collected using the NVS standard forest monitoring and vegetation inventory methods, and allows data to be entered directly by the person who undertook the data collection. It includes a range of point-of-entry and post-entry validation checks that ensure that the data conform to the NVS databank standard. Data can then be exported for upload into the primary NVS databank via the website.

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A strategic initiative of the Department of Conservation, to develop a system to report effectively on the state of New Zealand's biodiversity, and how it is changing, both within areas managed by the Department and in the wider New Zealand context. It will help managers decide which work is most important and whether it was successful. A natural heritage database application will be a core component of the NHMS programme of work. Much of the data will later be available to other agencies. The Department expects the application to be in use within the organisation in 2009.

There are several databases associated with the Nationally Significant Arthropod Collection, hosted by Landcare Research.

NZACbugs contains information on specimens in NZAC and species present in New Zealand. Because of the large number of specimens in the collection, this part is restricted to groups that are considered to be of special importance or have been recently revised, e.g., type-specimens, wetas, orchard leafrollers, and Fauna of New Zealand revisions. There are more than 19000 records representing about 40000 specimens of 3000 species. Parts of this information are available as Web documents (images of Lepidoptera type specimens; genera of Coleoptera and Hymenoptera in NZAC; specimen records as meta-data points on the Landcare Research's GUILD GIS Web program).

BUGS is a bibliographic database of 16000 records on New Zealand terrestrial invertebrates, covering the period 1775-1993. This has been published on CD-ROM and is available from Manaaki Whenua Press.

Pacific is a database of information on species of the Pacific, created in collaboration with UNDP / FAO-SPEC. Distribution information is being made available by Landcare Research on the SPC/FAO Web.

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The New Zealand Biodiversity Recording Network is a web-based system to record and process contributed natural history observations (birds, plants, butterflies, mushrooms, reptiles, frogs and mammals).

The NZ Biodiversity Recording System is being developed and administered by a team at Landcare Research and Lincoln University together with an informal stakeholder steering group from across New Zealand. The project is funded by TFBIS and is currently hosted at Landcare Research although will remain independent. Data will support New Zealand's GBIF node.

The New Zealand Freshwater Fish Database (NZFFD) hosted by NIWA records the occurrence of fish in fresh waters of New Zealand, including major offshore islands. It is a Nationally Significant Database.

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The following NZ Councils successfully use this database.

• Hawkes Bay Regional Council

The Nationally Significant Collections for fungi and micro-organisms have several associated databases, hosted by Landcare Research.

The Fungal Guide contains field-guide like information on some of the more common macrofungi of New Zealand. The NZFungi database provides a searchable catalogue of all fungal names used in a New Zealand context, their synonymy and bibliography, the specimens in PDD and cultures in ICMP, and descriptions and images of many of the fungi, together with links to distribution maps based on specimens in PDD. The virtual Mycota web pages provide an electronic, flora-like compilation of the fungi of New Zealand. The descriptions and images have been extracted from many different sources, but mostly scientific journals. These are supplemented by colour images of many of the fungi.

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The New Zealand Land Cover Database (LCDB) is digital map of New Zealand, showing the land cover grouped into the following nine major land cover classes.

• Exotic forest
• Exotic shrubland
• Native forest
• Native vegetation
• Other native land cover
• Primarily horticulture
• High-producing exotic grassland
• Low-producing exotic grassland
• Artificial surfaces

The LCDB uses satellite images to define polygons for areas with similar land cover types. The land use classifications for the polygons are then stored in a spatial database that can be used for mapping. The Land Cover Database version 2 uses images of land cover from 1996-97 and 2001-02.

The LCDB is freely available for public use, licenced by the Ministry for the Environment under a Creative Commons Attribution Licence.

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The New Zealand National Paleontological Database contains data relating to the specimens in the national collections of animal and plant macrofossils and microfossils, paleontological samples, residues, and type and reference collection of fossil specimens and modern specimens for comparison with fossil material. This is a Nationally Significant Database, and is hosted by GNS.

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New Zealand Organisms Register (NZOR) is a national information infrastructure project to efficiently mobilise, integrate, and share authoritative taxonomic information critical to maintaining New Zealand’s Conservation and Biosecurity decision support systems and processes.

Over the next three years the vision for NZOR is to create an accurate, authoritative, comprehensive and continuously updated catalogue of taxonomic names of all New Zealand biota and other taxa of importance to New Zealand.

Discuss the New Zealand Organisms Register (NZOR) in the Dataversity Public Discussion group.

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The New Zealand Plant Conservation Network website provides information about native plants and their conservation in New Zealand. It has information about the entire flora of NZ including 2500 plants for sites and factsheets for more than 6000 species of plant and fungi.

Dataversity members Philippa Crisp and John Sawyer are both NZPCN Council members.

Join the online discussion about NZPCN.

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The New Zealand Recognised Bird Names database is provided by the Ornithological Society of New Zealand (OSNZ). It is derived from the 3rd Edition (1990) of its Checklist of the Birds of New Zealand and the Ross Dependency, Antarctica and includes subsequent decisions of the Rare Birds Committee of the OSNZ.

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The New Zealand Threatened Plants and Fungi database is maintained by the New Zealand Plant Conservation Network.

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The database Nga Tipu Whakaoranga is associated with the Nationally Significant New Zealand Flax and Living Plant Collections, and is hosted by Landcare Research. The database provides fully referenced, detailed information on how Maori used plants to survive in New Zealand, before the arrival of Europeans.

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The Natural Environmental Collection Database is a database of Otago Museum’s collections including birds, vertebrates, native plants, terrestrial invertebrates, insects and spiders.

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Plant-SyNZ (pronounced "plant signs"), is a database of invertebrate herbivores found on New Zealand plants and a tool for assessing the biodiversity of insect and mite herbivores on native plants.

Invertebrate herbivore - host plant database

The invertebrate herbivore - host plant association database focuses on New Zealand native plants and New Zealand native invertebrate herbivores. It is linked to the Landcare Research nzflora and nzbugs (invertebrates) databases. The Plant-SyNZ database features a reliability index to show the quality of information supporting each association.

Herbivore biodiversity tool

Plant-SyNZ is a tool for assessing the biodiversity of insect and mite herbivores on native plants. It is being developed by Crop & Food Research for use by professional scientists, lay people and school students. Insects are an important and numerous component of New Zealand’s biodive rsity and it is important that they are assessed in biodiversity studies. Plant-SyNZ is based upon photographs of plant damage caused by the invertebrates and photographs of invertebrates that have a unique appearance on a particular plant. The tool is designed to be used for a wide variety of purposes and by people with different skill levels.

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The Protected Areas Network (PAN-NZ) database brings information on legally protected areas managed by a range of organisations into a single database. It is national in scope and includes areas administered by Department of Conservation, Queen Elizabeth II National Trust, Nga Whenua Rahui, and several regional councils. The database currently lacks information from city and district councils. It has proved very valuable for conservation planning and underpins both the national threatened environments classification and the recent national guidelines for protection of native biodiversity on private land.

The PAN-NZ database is maintained and updated by Landcare Research on an as-needed basis (ie when funding is available), usually in relation to specific project needs related to biodiversity conservation and management. Landcare Research recently undertook a TFBIS-funded project to assess the state of information on protected areas and recommend a pathway forward to complete the PAN-NZ database and make it more widely available.

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The Allen Herbarium for Plant Biosystematics is a Nationally Significant Collection, with several associated databases, hosted by Landcare Research. The Plant Names Database lists over 36,000 names, including synonyms and incorrectly applied names. The database indicates which of the names are preferred for use at the Allan Herbarium (CHR), and provides information on the biostatus and the authorship of the taxa. It contains data for lichens, liverworts, hornworts, mosses, ferns, freshwater algae and seed plants in New Zealand. The Specimen Database is used to store and retrieve herbarium specimen information and to generate specimen labels. It currently contains over 150,000 records, or approximately 25% of the specimens in the herbarium. Information from the Plant Names Database and parts of the Specimen Database are available online at Nga Tipu Aotearoa - New Zealand Plants.

The All New Zealand Species Database contains a list of all vascular plant species recorded as present in New Zealand. The database currently lists records for approximately 28 000 species and 7000 synonyms. These records are derived from a wide range of sources including the Allan Herbarium, horticultural societies, nursery catalogues, botanic gardens, arboreta, and published literature. This database is mainly used by the Plant Biodiversity and Biosecurity Information Services as a tool to help determine whether a species has been recorded in New Zealand.

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State of the Takiwa describes a culturally-based environmental monitoring and reporting system being developed by Te Runanga o Ngai Tahu as part of the overall Ki Uta Ki Tai - Mountains to the Sea Natural Resource Management framework outlined in the tribal vision, Ngai Tahu 2025.

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Te Papa’s natural history collections database includes plants, birds, molluscs, land mammals, reptiles and amphibians, fish, and arthropods, from 1769 to present day. The collections are mostly from New Zealand, although there are some Pacific collections. Only a percentage of specimens are databased, with percentages varying per collection. Collections are databased in Te Papa’s collection management system.

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