Infestation Mapping Project update

October 2025

Updating the national picture for wildings 

Work is underway to update the national wilding conifer infestation map—an essential tool for tracking and managing infestations across Aotearoa New Zealand.

Infestation mapping plays a key role in our ability to manage wilding conifers and direct resources and efforts where they will have the most benefit. Mapping helps with: 

•  Identifying and prioritising areas for control operations
• Monitoring the success of control work 
• Tracking change over time - to show the progress from control work, capture wildings in new locations, and monitor the extent that known infestations are expanding
• Modelling of possible future spread.

Since the last national map was brought together in 2018, substantial areas have received control reducing the extent and density of wildings in these areas. In other areas without any control, wildings will have spread further and increased in density.

The project’s goal is to establish a robust, repeatable process that will allow future updates to be done every two to five years. There are three main components to this work:

• Updating infestations using data gathered from Programme partners
• Using aerial or satellite imagery with computer modelling to automate the detection of wildings
• Developing standardised protocols for data collection and update processes, to ensure future updates are consistent and repeatable.

The team at BNZ is coordinating, managing and funding the project, working closely with our LINZ colleagues – the engine behind WCIS – and council partners, who play a key role in collating and sharing data and their own knowledge of the local area. The team at LINZ has developed a clever data collection tool (we call it an ‘infestation sandbox’) that can receive different types of GIS data with infestation information we are collecting - whether points or pixels from aerial imaging, or shapes from other map-based or GIS sources. All the data can then be ‘cleaned and validated’ to get it to an appropriate form where it can be integrated into WCIS, making it available for Programme partners to access and use and importantly, have the ability for users to more easily update the data in future.

Will it be possible for general users, even the public to add to infestation data in the future? Possibly, but in the meantime, recording wilding pines in iNaturalist is a good way to go. You'll find other New Zealanders and groups sharing their observations of wilding pines.

This update aims to provide the best possible estimate of wilding conifer extent at this point in time — helping support smarter, more targeted control efforts across the country. In future it will give us another way to show the difference that everyone’s efforts are making over time.

Have questions about this project, or data you could contribute?  Contact us wilding.pines@mpi.govt.nz