KiwiScienceTika Tipu is experimental. It is a plant selector for students, researchers and curious minds. There is no guarantee that its outputs are entirely accurate — always sanity-check a species list against local knowledge, your regional council, and an eco-sourcing nursery before you buy plants.
Part 1 · User guide
Using Tika Tipu
Tika Tipu — the right plant in the right place — narrows a database of New Zealand native species down to the ones that suit your particular patch of ground. You answer up to five questions about the site, and the app returns the species that match all of them.
1 How the selector works
Every filter you set narrows the list. Every filter you skip widens it. The counter at the top of the app — n species match — updates live, so you can watch the effect of each choice as you make it.
All five filters are optional. Skipping one means “any”, not “none”. If you only know your region, set the region and jump straight to the results.
| Step | What it asks | Skip it if… |
|---|---|---|
| 1 · Region | Which ecological region your site sits in | You want the national list, or your site is a garden using cultivated stock |
| 2 · Soil | The soil order under your site | You have not looked the soil up yet |
| 3 · Moisture | How wet the ground usually is, and whether it can suffer droughts | Conditions vary a lot across the site |
| 4 · Frost | The worst frost the site normally gets | You do not know the site’s winters yet |
| 5 · Plant use | The setting and the exact zone within it | You want a general regional list rather than one tuned to a niche |
| 6 · Results | — | — |
Move around freely. The numbered stepper at the top of the app is clickable — you can jump back to any step, change one answer and return to the results. The chips in the sticky bar show what is currently set, and the small × on each chip clears just that filter.
↻ Start over in the header clears everything at once.
2 Step 1 · Ecological region
Many native species in Aotearoa occur naturally only in certain parts of the country. Manawa, the New Zealand mangrove (Avicennia marina), grows only north of Kawhia and will not survive further south. Filtering by region is the single most effective way to avoid recommending a plant that has no business being on your site.
New Zealand is divided into 78 ecological regions, which group ecological districts sharing broadly similar geology, climate, landforms and biota. In the app you can either click your region on the map or pick it from the dropdown list.
- Not sure which region you are in? Zoom the map to your site — the region boundaries are drawn over the basemap and the name appears when you click.
- Working across a boundary? Run the search twice, once for each region, and plant only the species that appear in both lists.
- Eco-sourcing: region is also your guide to provenance. Seed collected from your own ecological region is better adapted to local conditions and keeps regional genetic character intact.
Read more: DOC guide to ecological regions and districts (PDF) · Wikipedia overview
3 Step 2 · Soil order
Most plants are adapted to particular soil environments. The New Zealand Soil Classification sorts our soils into 15 orders on the basis of how they formed and how they behave; Tika Tipu uses 13 of them. Look your site up on the Landcare Research soil map before you choose.
| Soil order | What it is like |
|---|---|
| Pallic | Pale soils; wet in winter, dry in summer. Dry eastern hill and downlands. |
| Brown | New Zealand’s most widespread soils; well drained, moderately fertile. |
| Podzol | Acidic and strongly leached, under high rainfall and old forest. |
| Oxidic | Old, deeply weathered volcanic clays — Auckland and Northland. |
| Granular | Clayey soils formed on old volcanic ash. |
| Ultic | Strongly weathered with a dense, clay-rich subsoil; prone to erosion. |
| Raw | Very young and barely developed: screes, active dunes, tidal flats. |
| Recent | Young soils on floodplains, slopes and fresh alluvium; often fertile. |
| Melanic | Dark, well-structured and fertile; limestone and basalt country. |
| Allophanic | Free-draining volcanic ash soils — Taranaki, Waikato, Bay of Plenty. |
| Pumice | Coarse, free-draining pumice of the central North Island. |
| Organic | Peaty soils of wetlands and bogs, formed from partly decayed plants. |
| Gley | Waterlogged soils with grey, oxygen-poor subsoils. |
| Semi-Arid | The driest inland basins — Central Otago and the Mackenzie. |
Soil order and moisture are not the same question. A Gley soil is wet by definition, but a Brown soil might be wet in a hollow and dry on a ridge. Set the moisture step from what you can see on the ground, not from the soil name.
Read more: NZ Soil Classification — the soil orders
4 Step 3 · Soil moisture and drought
Soil moisture describes the usual moisture content of the ground at your planting spot, for most of the year — not the state it happens to be in on the day you visit.
| Setting | What it means | Typical places |
|---|---|---|
| Wet | Waterlogged or frequently saturated | Swamp and bog margins, seepages, pond edges, backswamps |
| Mesic | Moderate and well drained — neither soggy nor droughty | Most flat to rolling country, gentle slopes, sheltered gullies |
| Dry | Free-draining or drought-prone | Ridges, north-facing slopes, sand, gravel, shallow soils over rock |
Sites are rarely uniform. A stream bank runs from wet at the water’s edge to dry on the terrace above in a few metres. Run a separate search for each moisture band and plant each band with its own list — that is exactly the thinking behind the zoned diagrams in Step 5.
Can the site suffer droughts?
The moisture band describes the usual state of the ground. Drought is a different question, and the tick box under the cards asks it separately: can this area go through spells where it dries out hard?
It is not only dry sites that do. A mesic paddock on the east coast can bake through a dry summer; a wetland margin can draw down and crack in a drought year; a shallow soil over rock dries out within weeks of the last rain no matter how wet the district is. A species with no drought tolerance at all is the first thing to die in that spell, even though it looked perfectly matched to the site the rest of the time.
What ticking it does. The filter keeps only species carrying some drought tolerance, on top of whichever moisture band you chose. So “Mesic + droughts” gives you plants that like ordinary ground but will ride out a dry spell — a smaller and more resilient list than Mesic alone.
5 Step 4 · Frost
Frost kills more new plantings than almost anything except stock and weeds, and it does it in the first winter. Many of our best-known natives — pōhutukawa, pūriri, karaka, nikau, kauri, mangrove — are frost tender and simply cannot be planted where the ground freezes. This step keeps them out of your list before you order them.
| Setting | What it means | Typical places |
|---|---|---|
| Not sure | Skips the filter entirely | Use this if you do not yet know the site’s winters |
| Frost-free | Frosts essentially never happen | Northland, coastal Auckland and Coromandel, exposed coastal edges anywhere warm |
| Light frosts | Occasional light ground frost, roughly to −2 °C | Most coastal and lowland districts, sheltered north-facing slopes |
| Hard frosts | Regular or severe frosts | Inland and upland country, the Volcanic Plateau, inland Canterbury and Otago, frost hollows anywhere |
Answer for the worst frost your site normally sees, not the average. Choosing “Frost-free” excludes nothing — every plant copes with no frost — but it is still worth setting, because it records the answer on your results page.
Cold air runs downhill and pools. A valley floor, a hollow, or flat ground trapped behind a solid fence or shelterbelt can frost several degrees harder than the slope immediately above it. Frost hollows are why a species that thrives on the hillside dies on the flat below. If your site is one of those, answer for the hollow, not for the district.
6 Step 5 · Plant use and zones
This is the step that makes Tika Tipu more than a regional species list. Choose the setting you are planting — a road verge, a raingarden, a dune, a wetland — and the app draws that setting as a labelled cross-section. Then click the exact zone in the drawing where your plants are going.
Each zone carries its own palette of species. The crest of a dune, its seaward front slope and the damp slack behind it are three completely different growing environments only metres apart, and the app treats them that way.
- Pick a setting from the card grid. Each card shows a thumbnail of its cross-section.
- Click a zone in the drawing. Hover first — a label names each zone before you commit.
- Only one zone at a time can be active. Clicking the selected zone again clears it.
- Check the chips below the drawing. Some zones cannot be drawn in cross-section (a pergola, a rock garden, a swale’s dry bed) and are offered as chips instead. They work the same way.
- Use the back button above the drawing to return to the settings grid and try another.
The drawings live in the app, not in this guide. They are interactive there — hover to read a zone name, click to select it. Open Step 5 in Tika Tipu to work through them.
The twelve settings
| Setting | What it covers | Examples of its zones |
|---|---|---|
| Urban | Gardens, lawns, hedges, green roofs and walls | Living wall, green roof, herbaceous border, permeable paving, specimen tree, hedge |
| Swales & Raingardens | Stormwater treatment and detention ponds | Road edge, wet bed, raingarden bed, wet and dry detention ponds, aquatic |
| Railway Ballast | Trackside and ballast planting | Inner ballast open turf, outer ballast edge turf, outermost shrubbery, outer rail back bush |
| Road Verge | Verges and traffic islands | Water table, sight line, mown edge (low and mid), frangible edge, back fence, and cut/fill at crest, mid slope and foot |
| Rural | Shelterbelts and farm planting | Hedgerow, under pivot arm, 1–2 row shelterbelt, 3–5 row edge and centre, vineyard |
| Riparian | Stream and river corridors | Terrace top, upper and lower scarp, levee, backswamp floodplain, emergent, aquatic bed |
| Dune Country | Coastal dune systems | Two profiles: a sand dune (foredune toe, front slope, crest, back, slack, sand plain, interdune wetland, stable back dunes) and a rocky shore (coastal bush, cliffs, tidal pools) |
| Coastal | Estuaries, marshes and cliffs | Mudflats, lower and upper marsh, lagoon reeds, exposed cliffs, coastal bush edge and centre |
| Wetlands | Freshwater wetland types | Swamp, fen, grazing marsh, bog, aquatic floating and emergent, fluctuating tussock scrub and turf |
| Restoration | Bush and hillslope restoration | Skin, border and core rows; crest, upper, mid, foot and toe slopes; rolling hills, flats & plains; and the landform features drawn on the profile — rocky outcrop, slip edge and centre, seepage, moraine, montane, epiphytes |
| Mātauranga Māori | Traditional uses and cultural plants | Rākau/muka, kai, rongoā, taonga, wai (water edge) |
| Remediation | Contaminated or degraded sites | Treated wastewater, mine spoil, quarry, compacted landfill |
Remediation settings are the most experimental part of the tool. Treat those lists as a starting point for further reading rather than a planting plan, and get specialist advice for contaminated ground.
7 Step 6 · Reading your results
The results page lists every species that passes all of your filters, grouped by planting stage. The line under the heading restates the filters that produced the list, so a printed copy explains itself.
- Simple / Detailed switches the level of information. Simple gives names only; Detailed adds height, spacing, synonym, growth form, shade tolerance and ecosystem services for each species. Where the database has no value for something it says so rather than printing a zero.
- Refine these results narrows the list further without going back through the wizard: search by name or synonym, or filter on ecosystem service, growth form, planting stage, shade, wet ground, salt, and a height range.
- Species names link out to the New Zealand Plant Conservation Network for photographs, descriptions and distribution.
- Copy list puts the names on your clipboard, ready to paste into an email to a nursery.
- Print produces a clean copy with the app furniture stripped out.
No results? You have probably over-filtered. Clear the most restrictive chip first — usually the plant-use zone, then the soil order. A combination such as a Pumice soil in a Southland wetland may genuinely have no matches because it barely exists.
8 Planting stages
Results are grouped by planting stage — the order in which species go into the ground on a restoration, not how big they get. Working through the stages is what turns a list of plants into a sequence of plantings, often over several years.
| Stage | What goes in | When |
|---|---|---|
| 1 · Pioneers & colonisers | Hardy, quick species that bind the soil and shelter everything that follows | First planting |
| 2 · Canopy & early successional | The framework trees and shrubs | Once the pioneers give some shelter |
| 3 · Understorey & enrichment | Shade-tolerant plants tucked under an establishing canopy | Once a canopy is forming |
| 4 · Epiphytes & mistletoes | Perching and parasitic plants | Last, once host trees are grown |
On a bare, exposed site, plant Stage 1 heavily and hold the rest back. Putting a Stage 3 understorey plant into open pasture usually wastes the plant. Stage 1 species also make the best hardy edge species described under where each plant goes.
9 Ecosystem services
Switch the results to Detailed and each species carries tags for the ecosystem services it provides. Wildlife and pollination services are listed first, because they are usually what people are planting for.
| Group | Services recorded |
|---|---|
| Wildlife & pollination | Nectar and pollen for lizards; nectar for insects; nectar for birds; seed and grain for birds; fruit for birds; fruit for lizards |
| Land & water | Erosion control; filtration; coastal shelter and protection |
| Shelter & amenity | Shelter; shade |
| People & materials | Cultural; timber; fibre; food |
Growth form is tagged too — forb, mat forb, rosette forb, tussock, bunch grass, grass, sedge, rush, reed, restiad reed, centrolepid, subshrub, shrub, tall shrub, small, medium and noble tree, fern, tree fern, epiphytic fern, mistletoe, vine, scrambler, cushion, turf, tall turf and aquatic turf — which is the quickest way to check that a list has structural variety rather than twenty shrubs.
10 Tips and troubleshooting
| If… | Try this |
|---|---|
| The map does not load | Check your internet connection — the basemap is fetched online. The dropdown list works offline. |
| You get far too many species | Add the plant-use zone. It is the sharpest filter in the tool. |
| You get none | Clear filters one at a time, starting with the plant-use zone. |
| Your site spans two regions or several moisture bands | Run one search per combination and plant each part of the site from its own list. |
| A species looks wrong for your area | Trust local knowledge. The database is broad-brush and the tool is experimental. |
| You want to keep a list | Use Copy list or Print — results are not saved between visits. |
Before you order plants, check availability with an eco-sourcing nursery in your region. Nurseries need lead time — often a full season — to grow to order, so talk to them early.
11 About the database
Dr Colin Meurk ONZM · plant ecologist
The species data behind Tika Tipu was compiled by Dr Colin Meurk, a New Zealand plant ecologist whose work on indigenous biodiversity in production and urban landscapes has shaped how native planting is done here. His research spans subantarctic and alpine vegetation, urban ecology and ecological restoration, and he has spent decades arguing that native plants belong in the everyday landscape — on farms, roadsides, city streets and back gardens — not only in reserves.
The database records, for thousands of native species, which ecological regions they occur in, which soils and moisture regimes they tolerate, which planting niches suit them, what stage of a restoration they belong to, and what ecosystem services they provide. Tika Tipu is a way of querying that knowledge; the knowledge itself is his.
Accuracy. The database is broad in scope, which means it is necessarily coarse in places. It records what a species can tolerate, which is not always what will thrive on your site. Use it to shortlist, then check with local sources.
Got your species list? Now plant it properly. Choosing the right species is only half the job — survival comes down to fencing, pest control, weed control and technique. Read How to plant, or jump straight to the planting day checklist.