Land Information New Zealand has made 20TB of aerial imagery available for free for the first time in a cloud-optimized format on Amazon Web Services (AWS), making it easier and faster to access these large datasets over the internet.
It includes the latest high-resolution imagery of the New Zealand landscape and imagery flown for emergency response. Also included are historic images of farmland and forestry from the 1970s to the mid-2000s, ‘stitched together’ from multiple scanned files through a Ministry for Primary Industries project to show rural Aotearoa – the contemporary Māori-language name for New Zealand – in a new light.
A cloud-optimized format allows for more efficient processing, such as users being able to retrieve just the part of the image they need rather than downloading the entire file. The approximately 400,000 images are available now on the Registry of Open Data on AWS, with support from the AWS Open Data Sponsorship Program. The registry provides unrestricted access to openly licensed datasets.
