University teaching and research

Teaching a moving target

In 1985, when the University of Auckland was already teaching GIS to senior undergraduates in Geography, there was no settled New Zealand pathway for becoming a GIS practitioner. The software was specialised, useful digital data were comparatively scarce, and access to suitable computing could determine what could be taught in practice. Students were learning a field while the field was still sorting out much of its own toolkit. GIS also sat awkwardly between established subjects. It involved cartography and geography, but also databases, computer graphics, image processing, statistics and the mathematics needed to make different geographic datasets line up. A university course therefore had to teach more than a new way to draw maps. It had to decide what students needed to understand about geographic information itself.

David V. Hawke described the Auckland course in a later account. His 1992 paper on gistt, a geographic information systems teaching tool, records senior undergraduate GIS teaching from 1985. The official University of Auckland Calendar for 1986 makes the subject visible in the curriculum as Geography 20.314, “Geographic Information Systems and Image Processing”. Its description included GIS principles and the computer analysis and presentation of cartographic and remotely sensed data. The combination is characteristic of the period: GIS and image processing were close neighbours because both required students to work directly with digital representations of geography before either had become routine desktop software.

The teaching environment was mixed rather than vendor-pure. Hawke's account records the use of both public-domain and commercial software. That arrangement gave students access to GIS concepts without assuming that one package defined the field, but it also meant teaching across interfaces, data structures and limitations that were not standardised. The later gistt work grew from that educational setting. Hawke developed a teaching tool suited to the course’s practical exercises.

Auckland’s teaching connected with other academic and professional GIS work. Hawke presented “Terrain modelling and GIS” at the inaugural Spatial Information Research Centre colloquium at Otago in 1989 and a paper on the influence of data complexity on GIS performance at AURISA in Wellington in 1991. Teaching, terrain modelling and computational performance were appearing in the same academic career. The subject was already moving between classroom questions and research questions about what GIS could process efficiently.

Auckland offered senior undergraduate GIS teaching in 1985, several years before the expansion of organisational GIS in the early 1990s.

Teaching with scarce access

Early GIS education was constrained by access in ways that are easy to lose from later accounts. A course depended on institutional software, laboratory access and prepared datasets rather than each student installing the same package on a personal computer. Commercial GIS and image-processing systems were institutional purchases, while useful digital data often came from government or research custodians under technical and sometimes commercial conditions. Laboratory time therefore had to be shared, exercises had to match the data and software actually available, and staff had to prepare material before students could begin the spatial part of the work.

Courses combined geographic concepts with practical software use. Students had to learn enough about coordinates, spatial data structures, raster and vector information, database relationships and map output to understand why an operation worked, while also learning the commands needed to make a specialist system perform it. A failed exercise might reflect a conceptual mistake, a data-format problem, a projection mismatch, a software limitation or simple lack of access to the required file. Teaching GIS meant teaching students how to separate those possibilities.

Students learned data preparation through their practical exercises. National datasets were not yet waiting in open portals, and many New Zealand spatial records were still being digitised inside government agencies. A lecturer designing a practical exercise therefore needed data that were small enough to handle, documented well enough to teach from and legally or institutionally available for student use. Remote-sensing exercises added image files, classification and display requirements to the same problem. The close pairing of GIS and image processing in Auckland's 1986 Calendar and Canterbury's later ARC/INFO and ERDAS environment reflects a teaching world in which the boundaries between spatial database work and digital imagery were still being built in practice.

Course material also had to compensate for a field that was changing faster than a settled local textbook tradition could capture. Staff used software manuals, international literature, their own research and local datasets; Hawke also developed a dedicated teaching tool at Auckland. The first SIRC proceedings soon provided another source of material grounded in problems being discussed in New Zealand. A student could encounter terrain modelling, organisational implementation, data exchange or natural-language spatial queries through work produced by researchers they might hear at a local colloquium. Teaching and research were therefore feeding each other from the beginning.

Building a workstation laboratory

The University of Canterbury followed a different route. A near-contemporary review by John P. Wilson and Pip Forer records Geography entering GIS teaching in 1987 with a graduate course. In 1989 the department acquired workstation ARC/INFO and ERDAS capability. The acquisition put a general vector GIS and a major raster image-processing system into the same teaching and research environment, allowing students to work with geographic databases and remotely sensed imagery rather than treating the two as unrelated specialities.

Workstation GIS expanded the exercises possible in a university laboratory. Forer and Wilson’s 1993 Canterbury account describes Geography’s Sun SPARCstations, a Roland eight-colour pen plotter, a Numonics digitiser, inkjet printers, a 24-bit scanner and Magellan Navstar 5000 GPS units. Fifteen Acorn A5000 RISC workstations served as X terminals into the Sun environment, while Geography deliberately avoided PC ARC/INFO. Elsewhere on campus, departments used Atlas-Pro, Tech-Base, GRASS, Intergraph MGE and other PC-based systems; Forer and Wilson described “little standardization of software at the present time”. The Havelock prototype tried to make that mixed environment usable by bringing scanned aerial photography, remotely sensed imagery, vector maps, bibliographic material and analytical tools together through Acorn RISC-OS, Sun OpenWindows and the campus network. It was a collection of specialised machines and packages being persuaded to cooperate, supported by technical staff who kept the software and datasets usable between classes.

Canterbury also demonstrates how quickly GIS escaped the boundaries of a geography course. In 1990 Richard Pascoe and John Penny published work on the interchange of data between geographic information systems and on constructing interfaces for geographic-data exchange. Pascoe and Neville Churcher then presented “Sharing geographical data” at the second SIRC colloquium in 1990 and developed the work in the New Zealand Journal of Computing the following year. By 1992 Canterbury computer scientists were presenting GIS as a set of problems of direct interest to computer science.

The papers examined the difficulty of exchanging geographic information between systems with different structures and assumptions. Researchers had to consider geometry, attributes, identifiers and the meaning of the records being transferred. Modern web services and open standards did not yet provide infrastructure for routine exchange. Canterbury researchers were investigating incompatibility as operational GIS users encountered it in practice.

Geography could teach spatial analysis, cartography, remote sensing and applications. Computer Science could investigate data structures, interfaces, databases and collaborative software. Surveying and engineering brought other spatial measurement traditions. Courses, research papers and projects brought these disciplines together.

From software to spatial information

The early curriculum could easily have become little more than software training because the packages were unfamiliar and the interfaces demanding. Hawke was studying terrain modelling and computational performance. Canterbury researchers were working on data interchange. At Otago, papers soon addressed natural-language access to GIS databases, semantic data models, fuzzy spatial representation and organisational GIS adoption. Universities were using the new systems while also examining where their underlying models failed or created new problems.

The terminology needs care. Much of this work can now be recognised as part of GIScience, but New Zealand researchers did not necessarily use that label for every project at the time. Their paper titles more often referred to GIS, spatial information, data modelling, terrain, information systems or particular applications. The intellectual shift is visible without retroactively renaming all of it. Researchers were asking questions about geographic information that could not be answered by learning a sequence of software commands.

University researchers could investigate methods before agencies committed to production systems. A paper could test a method for exchanging geographic data, representing uncertainty or querying a spatial database before an agency had a business case for implementing the technique. A thesis could spend a year or more on a problem too narrow or speculative for an operational team. Some of that work remained academic, while other ideas moved outward through graduates, conference papers and collaborations.

Universities were also beginning to confront who spatial information was for. Vaughan R. J. Payne’s 1991 University of Otago MA thesis was titled Urupare Torohiko: Planning for the Equitable Use of Spatial Information in the Resolution of Treaty Claims. Payne examined equitable access to spatial information in Treaty claims.

A recurring research forum

The University of Otago brought researchers together across courses and departments. On 30 November and 1 December 1989 the Spatial Information Research Centre held its inaugural colloquium in Dunedin. The timing placed it only five months after the national multidisciplinary GIS conference in Wellington, but the two events served different historical roles. The Wellington meeting brought a broad professional community together at a moment of convergence. SIRC created a recurring university-centred forum in which spatial-information research could be presented, tested and revisited year after year.

The first colloquium already mixed technical and organisational questions. William Mackaness presented “Introducing GIS Into Organisations”, while David Hawke presented terrain modelling. The second colloquium in 1990 included P. J. Sallis on natural-language information retrieval from a GIS database and the Canterbury work on sharing geographic data. By the third meeting in 1991, the proceedings carried the title GIS: Realising the Potential and included work on multimedia spatial knowledge. SIRC also dealt with organisational, data and research questions beyond software demonstrations.

The fourth colloquium in 1992 illustrates how broad the research agenda had become. M. R. Anderson and George Benwell surveyed GIS use among local authorities in New Zealand and Victoria. P. R. Zwart wrote about mature GIS and the idea of “taking the G out of GIS”, while Canterbury computer scientists outlined GIS problems of interest to their discipline. These topics linked organisational adoption, information-system integration and technical research. The university forum was watching GIS spread into practice while simultaneously asking what the technology was becoming.

By 1993 and 1994, SIRC papers included semantic spatial data modelling, fuzzy representation, hazards information systems, wildlife decision support, connectionist approaches to spatial information, GPS data capture and repeated surveys of local-government GIS use. The Dunedin Pilot Hazards Information System brought University of Otago researchers together with geological scientists and local-government information requirements. In 1994 the project was reported as a GIS trial using natural-hazard, topographic and cadastral information. The university was participating directly in the field, with research projects crossing institutional boundaries.

The SIRC proceedings also reveal the advantage of recurrence. A single conference can preserve a snapshot, but an annual series records changes in questions. The local-government surveys could be repeated. A proposed hazards system could return as a trial. Methods first presented as conceptual work could later appear in applied projects. By the seventh colloquium in 1995, held jointly with AURISA in Palmerston North, papers were addressing environmental management and natural-language techniques for railway safety reporting. The forum had become a continuing part of the Australasian spatial-information research network.

The original annual-colloquium sequence can now be traced from 1989 to its twentieth event in 2008. The meetings continued as part of a sustained professional and research community. The inaugural SIRC NZ GIS and Remote Sensing Research Conference in 2013 began a separate series.

The later university record also preserves the people who maintained GIS as a taught and practised discipline. At Otago, Aubrey Miller taught GIS, spatial analysis, programming and remote sensing and helped convene GIS@Otago, while Todd Redpath used remote sensing in glacier and seasonal-snow research. At Massey, Matthew Irwin taught across GIS, remote sensing, GPS and UAV technologies. These roles kept technical practice, research and teaching in direct contact.

Māori land values, 1995–1996

Research and professional meetings during the mid-1990s addressed the use of GIS for Māori land and values. Garth Harmsworth prepared a discussion document on Māori values for land-use planning in 1995 and contributed an extended abstract on GIS and Māori land values to the April 1996 remote-sensing and GIS workshop at Massey University.

The conference Mapping Māori Land and Resource Aspirations was held in Wellington on 28 June 1996, with proceedings issued by Critchlow Associates. These contributions placed Māori land, information and planning within the period’s GIS discussions. The later Manaaki Whenua report on GIS for iwi and hapū records the publications and conference, providing a link between the earlier work and subsequent research.

Publishing a new field

A research field also needs places where work can be recorded. SIRC proceedings became one such archive, but they sat beside journals and professional publications rather than replacing them. Hawke's teaching work appeared in the International Journal of Geographical Information Systems. Canterbury data-interchange research appeared in the New Zealand Geographer, the New Zealand Journal of Computing and an international GIS journal. The same spatial problem could therefore be read by geographers, computer scientists and GIS specialists through different publication channels.

New Zealand's specialist cartographic literature was changing at the same time. The New Zealand Cartographic Journal ran to 1990, and its successor from 1991 carried the title New Zealand Cartography and Geographic Information Systems. The journal brought cartographic and GIS work into the same publication. Universities were teaching and researching GIS while cartographers were debating how computer mapping and GIS affected established practice.

The resulting literature was fragmented by modern standards. A useful idea might first appear in a colloquium paper, return in a thesis, then be developed in a journal article or an operational project. SIRC's recurring proceedings are valuable because they preserve early stages that conventional journal databases often miss. Students and researchers used conference volumes, software documentation and journals from several disciplines.

Surveying and the spatial disciplines

Several university disciplines adopted GIS. Otago's surveying tradition already dealt with coordinate systems, measurement, photogrammetry and the legal and technical organisation of land information. Canterbury's computer scientists were examining exchange formats and interfaces while geographers worked with GIS and remote sensing. Environmental and geological researchers brought problems defined by terrain, hazards and natural resources. Planning supplied questions about land use, administration and access to information. The emerging field was held together by geographic data rather than by one departmental lineage.

Surveying and GIS research overlapped at Otago. SIRC papers involved spatial measurement, GPS, hazards, databases and information systems, and the university's research community crossed departmental boundaries. SIRC’s remit covered spatial information across software packages and academic disciplines.

This multidisciplinary setting also affected what counted as research. A computer scientist could treat GIS as an interface and data-structure problem. A geographer could examine terrain or local-government adoption. A surveyor could focus on positioning and measured spatial data. A planner could ask how information should be used in decisions. Those questions shared enough concepts and tools to create a field while remaining different enough that no single department could easily own it.

Otago introduced a Bachelor of Science in Land and Spatial Information Studies in the late 1980s. Its School of Surveying history records the degree alongside measurement science and land planning programmes. Spatial information was becoming a distinct subject of university study during the same years that agencies and councils were expanding their systems.

Researching adoption

George Benwell appears repeatedly in the early Otago record, particularly where GIS met organisational and environmental questions. His work with other researchers turned the adoption of GIS into a subject for empirical study. The rapid spread of GIS during the early 1990s produced claims about benefits that researchers tested against organisational experience. Universities could compare users, examine implementation patterns and ask why some systems became embedded while others remained specialist tools.

The local-government work developed through several stages. A 1992 SIRC paper surveyed GIS usage among local authorities in New Zealand and Victoria. A 1994 paper compared the New Zealand situation in July 1993 with February 1992. Andrew Marr and George Benwell then extended the work through a 1995 study of local-government GIS since 1989. Marr's 1996 MSc thesis, Geographic Information Systems Maturity in New Zealand Local Government, provided a 126-page research treatment of the subject.

Practitioners installed systems, researchers surveyed the results, and findings returned to the profession through SIRC and other forums. Postgraduate work developed concepts such as GIS maturity and organisational integration from these exchanges. Chapter 23 follows the local-government experience in more detail.

That connection also helped produce practitioners who understood GIS as an information-system problem. Students encountering the field through postgraduate work saw data quality, organisational structure, maintenance and user requirements alongside spatial analysis. A thesis on maturity or a project on hazards information required engagement with organisations outside the university. The line between education and professional practice was therefore permeable well before formal geospatial degree programmes became common.

Postgraduate research

Theses are particularly useful in the history of a young technical field because they preserve work that may never become a journal article. They can record data structures, software limitations, implementation choices and failed approaches in more detail than a short paper. Colley's 1979 Canterbury thesis, discussed in Chapter 3, is an earlier example. By the 1990s, theses and postgraduate projects were appearing within an established GIS research community.

Payne's 1991 Otago thesis and Marr's 1996 MSc illustrate how wide that environment had become. One addressed equitable use of spatial information in Treaty claims; the other studied GIS maturity in local government. Neither can be reduced to learning a package. Both treated spatial information as part of larger institutional relationships. Other university work during the period connected GIS with hazards, environmental management, wildlife, terrain modelling and data exchange.

The postgraduate system also moved knowledge between organisations. Research problems came from councils, science agencies, government records and field projects. Students and staff presented results at SIRC, AURISA and specialist meetings. Graduates then entered a labour market in which councils, government departments, consultancies and science organisations were expanding GIS capability. The universities did not create that demand, but they increasingly supplied people able to work with geographic databases as well as maps.

Technical staff maintained the teaching environment. Workstation laboratories needed machines configured, accounts managed, software installed, data copied, plots produced and practical sessions supported. Course demonstrators and technical staff often appear poorly, if at all, in journal papers and conference proceedings.

Cyclone Bola erosion research, 1995

Sheryl Denise Hendriksen used GIS in her 1995 Massey University thesis to investigate soil-slip erosion following Cyclone Bola in 1988. Her analysis examined relationships between the erosion and slope angle, underlying rock type and slope aspect on the North Island’s East Coast. Aerial photographs helped delineate soil slips, while digital contour data supplied terrain information.

The research also examined how more detailed slope and aspect information could improve the land-use-capability information available to managers and planners. It brought several New Zealand data sources into an analysis of a specific environmental problem. Hendriksen’s work gives the university account a named contribution in soil science and connects postgraduate GIS research with the practical task of assessing erosion-prone land.

A field rather than a package

By the middle of the 1990s, New Zealand university GIS had several characteristics of a durable field. Formal teaching was documented at Auckland and Canterbury. Otago had a recurring spatial-information research forum with a growing proceedings series. Computer scientists were publishing on geographic data exchange and system design. Postgraduate research was examining organisational adoption, Treaty-related spatial information, hazards and environmental applications.

The field was also connected outward. SIRC papers included researchers from universities, Crown science organisations and practical government contexts. AURISA provided another route between academic and professional work. GIS education was therefore not developing behind the university gate while practitioners built a separate industry. The same people, papers and research questions moved between laboratories, departments, conferences and operational organisations.

Operating a package was only part of GIS expertise. Students also faced incompatible data, uncertain source quality, database design, organisational maintenance and spatial-analysis questions. University research investigated these problems while teaching provided access to specialised systems. GIS had become a subject whose methods and assumptions could be tested as well as taught.

By 1996 New Zealand had university GIS courses, specialist laboratories, postgraduate research, an annual spatial-information colloquium and regular exchange with practitioners. Each university built its programme at its own pace, without a single national GIS curriculum.

That exchange extended beyond the universities. Vendors, consultancies, user groups and professional networks were creating a wider GIS community at the same time that universities were producing research and graduates. By the mid-1990s GIS in New Zealand was no longer held together only by a few departmental systems or isolated technical projects. It had acquired places where it could be taught, criticised, researched and passed to the next group of practitioners.

From individual papers to a national pathway

The later education landscape was much broader than the early university laboratories. LINZ’s tertiary directory, updated in March 2026, lists GIS teaching across all eight New Zealand universities as well as NorthTec, Unitec, Eastern Institute of Technology and the Southern Institute of Technology. The offerings range from introductory papers and minors to majors, postgraduate programmes, remote sensing and geospatial data science. LINZ also published student and graduate profiles to show how that study translated into work in councils, central government, defence, research, consulting, infrastructure, environmental management and Māori organisations.

Capability policy increasingly tried to connect those courses with employment. LINZ cited the 2012 geospatial skills-shortage research and the 2016 Graduate Pathways work when explaining its tertiary GIS scholarships. Scholarship recipients included students studying GIS, spatial data science and geospatial science through several institutions. In September 2026 LINZ announced that it would not call for applications for the 2027 academic year because of budget constraints, while leaving open a reassessment for 2028. That pause belongs in the chronology because it shows that geospatial education support was a funded programme, not simply promotional material.

LINZ’s student and graduate profiles name Alan Scandrett, Alex Pasco, Alistair Collow, Amit Kokje, Cait Giles, Cheng Ho Pan (Ben Cheng), Chloe Samaratunga, Christina McCabe, Deanna Teao, Dempsey Rose-Day, Emma Burge, Hamish Kingsbury, Hannah Reid, Jennifer Coppola, Jordan Stewart, Josef Beautrais, Kasey Oomen, Kelly Hayhurst, Kiu Hei Chloe Yip, Mat Darling, Nikora Warren Heitia, Rachael Nilsson, Rebecca McMorran, Richard Law, Ronny Rowe, Sam Williamson, Samuel Wong, Shalini Mukherjee, Spencer Han, Taipuni Ruakere, Talia Mather, Tania Te Hira, Tristan McHardie, Will Jones. Its tertiary course directory, updated in March 2026, also names Katarzyna Sila-Nowicka, Lars Brabyn, Kristin Stock, Jonathan Procter, Russell Prince, Mairéad de Róiste, Ocean Mercier, Vanessa Bastos, Ioannis Delikostidis, Carolynne Hultquist, Lindsey Conrow, Crile Doscher, Antoni Moore, Chifuyu Horikoshi, Glenn Aguilar, Lisa Turnbull, Dinusha Jayathilake, Phil Lockett as institutional course or programme contacts. The directory listing records an education relationship at that date; it is not treated here as a substantive biography.