Data and sources

Public data, cited and credited. Our analysis on top.

Lepro is built on New Zealand's public geoscience and land data and its historic record. This page lists every source, its licence, how we credit it, and the limits we work within.

We sell analysis, not the reports

What you pay for is the reading, extraction, conversion, location, ranking and checking. Source documents stay with their owners: we cite them and link to them.

Not affiliated, not endorsed

Lepro is independent. NZP&M, GNS Science, DOC, LINZ and the National Library are named here as sources only. None of them has reviewed or endorsed Lepro, and nothing here is their advice.

Dated and fallible

Public layers go out of date and old reports contain errors. Every brief prints its data date, its confidence and its caveats. Open the cited page before relying on a number.

New Zealand Petroleum and Minerals (MBIE)

What we use: Mineral permits (current, applications, extensions), contest rounds, Schedule 4 and excluded land, open-file report footprints, survey footprints, mine-plan operations, drillholes.
Licence: Crown copyright, reused under the NZGOAL framework, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0).
Attribution: Source: New Zealand Petroleum and Minerals, Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment. Crown copyright, CC BY 4.0. Data as at the date shown in each report.
In practice: The register changes daily. Every brief prints the date its data was taken; check permit status on the NZP&M register before acting.

NZP&M minerals webmaps

Open-file exploration reports (NZP&M Geodata Catalogue)

What we use: Scanned Mines Department and company reports, transcribed page by page so that drill logs, samples and workings can be extracted and cited.
Licence: No report-level licence. Reports are released under the Crown Minerals Act; release gives public access, not a copyright licence. Copyright in post-1945 company reports likely stays with their authors. Crown works made before 1945 are out of copyright.
Attribution: Each value is cited by report number and page (for example “MR1160 p.3”) and linked to the report's page on the Geodata Catalogue.
In practice: We sell our analysis, not the reports. Briefs contain extracted facts, converted values and short verbatim quotes with page citations. We never sell or bundle the PDFs or long passages: follow the link to read the report at the source. We will seek NZP&M's written position on commercial quotation before selling at scale.

Geodata Catalogue

GNS Science

What we use: Geological Map of New Zealand 1:250 000 (QMAP) units and faults; mineral sites, orogenic gold deposits and the critical minerals (GERM) database.
Licence: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0), as stated on each GNS map service we use. We check each layer's own terms before using it in a paid product.
Attribution: Heron, D.W. (custodian) 2023. Geological Map of New Zealand 1:250 000, 4th edition. GNS Science, CC BY 4.0. Mineral occurrence data: GNS Science, CC BY 4.0.
In practice: Some GNS services bundle third-party layers under other terms (for example NIWA bathymetry, non-commercial). Those are not used in paid outputs.

GNS Science data

Department of Conservation Te Papa Atawhai

What we use: Public conservation land and its classes (stewardship, marginal strip, reserves, national park), used to show where an access arrangement may be possible and where land is closed.
Licence: Crown copyright, Creative Commons Attribution (DOC's terms state CC BY 3.0 NZ; some layer metadata states CC BY 4.0). Both allow commercial reuse with attribution.
Attribution: Crown Copyright: Department of Conservation Te Papa Atawhai, with the date the data was taken.
In practice: Land status in a brief comes from the loaded layers only. It is not legal advice on access; the access-arrangement decision is DOC's.

DOC data terms

Toitū Te Whenua Land Information New Zealand (LINZ)

What we use: Basemaps and aerial imagery (the order map), the NZ Gazetteer for locating named places, and NZ Topo50 links in each brief.
Licence: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0). Aerial imagery and elevation credit the organisation that captured them (often a regional council).
Attribution: Sourced from the LINZ Data Service and licensed for reuse under CC BY 4.0, plus the imagery provider's credit where shown.
In practice: Property ownership is not in the open parcel data and is not loaded. Briefs say so, and point to LINZ titles.

Attributing LINZ data

Papers Past (National Library of New Zealand), via DigitalNZ

What we use: Historic newspaper articles on gold and mining, 1860s to 1920s: claims, reefs, dredges, gold returns, rushes and warden's court reports, each located with a verbatim quote.
Licence: Rights are stated per article. Lepro stores only items marked “No known copyright restrictions”. Titles owned by Stuff Ltd are CC BY-NC-SA and are not used. Commercial use of the DigitalNZ API is under DigitalNZ's commercial terms.
Attribution: Newspaper title, date, “Papers Past, National Library of New Zealand, via DigitalNZ”, with a link to the article.
In practice: We accept DigitalNZ's commercial API terms before Lepro charges for anything that uses them.

Papers Past

EOX IT Services: Sentinel-2 cloudless

What we use: The default satellite imagery in the analysts' map, and in the product screenshots on this site.
Licence: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). Not licensed for commercial use without an agreement with EOX.
Attribution: Sentinel-2 cloudless – s2maps.eu by EOX IT Services GmbH (Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2025).
In practice: Paid maps and reports use LINZ aerial imagery or our own Copernicus Sentinel-2 composites instead, or EOX under a commercial licence. The screenshots here show the imagery with its credit as captured in the pilot.

s2maps.eu

OpenStreetMap and Esri

What we use: The order map's base map when LINZ is not configured, place search (Nominatim), alternative basemaps in the analysts' map, and road features used to fit historic plans.
Licence: OpenStreetMap: Open Database License (ODbL). Esri World Imagery: Esri's terms of use.
In practice: Shown with their credit on screen wherever they are used.

OpenStreetMap copyright

Licence details are as published by each source when checked in October 2026. This page is not legal advice. Spotted an attribution we have got wrong? Tell us.

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