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 It was originally made available under the Official Information Act.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 |  Imported in 2018, updated in 2022, and continously refined by mappers |
See #Huts below |
| Lodges | 19 | All have been manually mapped |
See #Lodges below |
| Campsites | 280 | 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 |  Work is ongoing to import all conservational land (as of October 2024). |
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[1]
- 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[1]
- 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[1]
- 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 October 2024, 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 October 2024, there is an ongoing project to import these areas, as part of the LINZ data import.
Tagging:
- (type=boundary + boundary=protected_area) or leisure=park
- protect_class=* (see table below)
- protection_title=* (see table below)
- protection_title:wikidata=* (see table below)
- name=*
- operator=Department of Conservation + operator:wikidata=Q1191417[1]
- ref:linz:topo50_id=* - ID of the geometry
- ref:linz:napalis_id=* - ID of the conservation land
- ref:linz:place_id=* - ID of the name, from the NZGB
Converting protection_title to protect_class
The Protected areas of New Zealand are categoried based on a protection_title=*, such as Scenic Reserve (see this Wikipedia article and this DOC website for more info). Therefore, we need to convert the protection_title=* into protect_class=*. The following table describes how each value is converted to its IUCN category. This is the same approach that wikidata uses, as prescribed in this report from Manaaki Whenua/Landcare Research[pp.27-28].
![[W]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/ff/Wikidata-logo.svg/24px-Wikidata-logo.svg.png "Wikidata"){kind=logo}
Discardable Tags
Previous imports added some obsolete tags which can safely be discarded:
See Also
Footnotes
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 The wikidata=* tag is automatically added by the NSI Project
- ↑ https://github.com/osmlab/name-suggestion-index/issues/6481
- ↑ https://osm.org/changeset/117146316