NZ Topo50 app helps farmers track hunters

Reading Time: 2 minutes A feature on a well-known New Zealand topography map phone app can help farmers keep track of hunters on their property and aid in transparency and safety.

IT expert Zane De’souza, who is a co vice-president of Upper Clutha Deer Stalkers, said the organisation undertakes many club hunts on different properties, often farms, and it divides hunting areas into smaller blocks with different hunters assigned to different blocks.

Traditional paper maps can be confusing and often hunters don’t know what block they are in or where their mates are, he said.

Hunter and member of the Invercargill Rifle Club Foster Price says the location-sharing function in the app is just one more tool that allows landowners to have comfort about where people are on their farm.

De’souza said he had wanted to write his own app to track hunters, but discovered that a location-sharing feature on the NZ Topo50 app allows different people who follow the same channel on the app to see one another’s location.

To do this, simply go to the settings, create a new channel under the Channel ID setting, and enter a channel name.

Zane De’souza has gone one step further and also draws a hunting block’s boundaries on Google Earth, and imports that into the app, allowing hunters to see a block’s boundaries.

Once all users are on the same channel, they can track each other’s movement.

De’souza said landowners who join the same channel can see the location of hunters and can check if people are staying within agreed boundaries.

Hunters can see the agreed area on their phone, which reduces the chance of straying onto parts of a property they don’t have permission for.

If someone is injured or lost, the group already knows where they are, so help can reach them sooner.

De’souza has gone one step further and also draws a hunting block’s boundaries on Google Earth, and imports that into the app to allow hunters to see a block’s boundaries.

Fellow hunter and member of the Invercargill Rifle Club Foster Price said the location-sharing function in the app is just one more tool that allows landowners to have comfort about where people are on their farm.

“There are many barriers to access, both real and imagined.”

Price said a farmer who has a pest problem does not necessarily want numbers of individual hunters to ask for access, but recreational hunting fraternities who are serious about pest control can use this tool for transparency and safety during hunts.

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