You may have seen recently there has been some forum discussion around Local Government Areas. The development team have been hard at work generating data for a full refresh of the LGA's for Australia and New Zealand including some of the combined off-shore islands. These have just been loaded and are now available for use.
Given the data has changed, you will likely find that if you were tracking your LGA's for certain challenges, the numbers may have changed. We are using the data provided via
https://osm-boundaries.com/ and to a great extent the data remains unchanged from the source.
A local government area (LGA) is an administrative division of a country that a local government is responsible for. The size of an LGA varies by country but it is generally a subdivision of a state, province, division, or territory. Geocaching Australia only provides LGA's for Australia and New Zealand (Regional Councils).
LGA boundaries are sourced from Open Street Maps (OSM) with areas that are not present in OSM being generated based on other available data. We do not provide any guarantee that the LGA boundaries match the local government areas and are provided for statistical and mapping purposes only.
We do not encourage you to use these boundaries for another other purposes.
Geocaching Australia is aware that some boundaries may have gaps between LGA's or overlap other LGA's based on the data sources from OSM. We do not curate the quality of data and accept it 'as is' from the source. Some LGA's are not present in the OSM data as they are Unincorporated Areas and do not have a boundary. Unincorporated areas are often in remote locations, cover vast areas, or have very small populations. Some Unincorporated areas are split into smaller LGA's for mapping purposes and some remain are very large areas with multiple, distinct boundaries. Some offshore islands are incorporated into the LGA boundaries and some of these are not associated with a specific state as they are administered by a level of government other than the state or local government. For example, management of Macquarie Island is the responsibility of the Tasmania Parks and Wildlife Service rather than a local council.
Some shoreline boundaries are set off-shore to cover islands and inlets and some follow the shore-line quite closely. This may result is some LGA's being 'rounded' or 'bumpy' vs. some LGA's which are quite 'crinkly'. The data is provided and used 'as-is' from OSM as Geocaching Australia does not attempt to correct boundary areas. There are also LGA boundaries that are 'disconnected' from others. e.g. French Island in Victoria is a separate LGA with no connecting border to any other LGA. It appears as a true island surrounded by uncorrected water. However, another island such as Rottnest Island in Western Australia is connected to the mainland through the Cockburn LGA.
Geocaching Australia is aware that when attempting to show the LGA's for New Zealand they will sometimes not render correctly and this is due to the data for the bounding box crossing the antemeridian, the line at 180°, opposite the prime meridian. Moving the map or zooming in to New Zealand may address that issue.
The development team are also working on other LGA related activities for your mapping, challenge and entertainment purposes and we will show these in the next week or so.
One change we can demonstrate now that is available is that the page to look for a zone has been simplified.
https://geocaching.com.au/zone
You used to have enter a zone type, state and letter to refine the names.
From now, you just start typing the name of a zone, any zone, any type of zone, and the field will autocomplete based on what you have typed. You can then select the zone you are interested in and click Submit to get to the zone details.
If you have any question or queries about the new LGA's or the new way to search for a zone, please kick off a new thread to start those discussion and the development would be more than pleased to help explain what we have done.
Enjoy.