NZ Place Names - Polygons (NZGB)

This layer only contains those place names that have a polygon geometry captured for them.
For the complete list of place names see NZ Place Names.

The Place Names Gazetteer contains official and unofficial place names under the jurisdiction of the New Zealand Geographic Board Ngā Pou Taunaha o Aotearoa (NZGB). Official place names are those that have been assigned, altered, adopted, approved, and validated under the NZGB Act 2008 or through other statutes that assign official names, for example, Treaty settlement legislation. Unofficial place names are those that have not been processed under the NZGB Act 2008 or through other relevant statutes.

Data is extracted from Land Information New Zealand’s (LINZ) ‘New Zealand Gazetteer of Official Geographic Names’, which is maintained by the NZGB Secretariat.

Geographical coverage encompasses New Zealand, the Ross Dependency of Antarctica, and the Continental Shelf of New Zealand.

The NZGB has naming jurisdiction over:

• natural features such as mountains, peaks, valleys, glens, forests, lagoons, swamps, creeks, streams, rivers, fords, lakes, glaciers or ice features, bays, islands or harbours (including man-made features of the same type)

• railways or railway stations, but not railway features such as marshalling yards, transfer sites, or track point locations

• places, i.e. cities, towns, villages, sites, areas, or similar places, including suburbs and localities

• undersea features

• Crown protected areas

• Districts and regions (altering only if requested by the local authority)

Each geographic feature has one or more place names associated with it. Place names usually comprise two components – ‘specific’, being for the proper noun, and ‘generic’, being a description of the geographic feature type.

Information provided for each place name may include: name; name status (whether official or unofficial); geographic feature type; authority by which an official name became official; district within which the name is located; geographic location; reference information; history/origin/meaning; and additional notes. Not all information is available for all names.

Positional accuracy is generally the same as 1:50K mapping. Information accuracy reflects information at the time of original capture.