NABIS makes available over 450 maps describing:

• The distribution of New Zealand's marine species.
• The New Zealand coastline, marine environment and bathymetry
• New Zealand cities, towns, lakes and rivers
• Marine reserves, Customary areas, and areas where fishing is restricted
• And fisheries management areas

There are also tools that allow you to create new maps from fisheries commercial catch data or a spreadsheet of your own latitude and longitude data. You can view or print any combination of map layers, at almost any zoom resolution that you wish.

The biodiversity map layers within NABIS include:

• 99 species of marine fish (both annual and seasonal distributions)
• 35 species of seabirds (both distributions and colonies
• 21 species of marine invertebrates (both annual and seasonal distributions)
• 3 species of marine mammals (colonies only)

You can change the colours used to represent each species distribution. You can compare the distributions of two or more species, or compare the distribution of a species to mapped environmental variables.

You can use NABIS's "Commercial catch" tool to dynamically create maps showing the commercial catch of marine fish in New Zealand. Commercial catch maps can be broken down by

• 99 commercially caught species
• 35 fishing methods
• 15 years worth of data

You can choose whether to have the labels associated with any given map layer turned on or off. You can save your map so that you can later insert it into a document.

The environmental map layers within NABIS include:

• 3 bathymetry maps (0-100m, 0-1000m, and full). The 0-100m bathymetry map records depth contours at 10m intervals.
• 5 Marine Environment Classification (MEC) system maps (created by the NZ Ministry for the Environment)
• Maps showing rivers, lakes, cities, towns, roads, residential areas, and major buildings
• New Zealand street names and addresses
• New Zealand place names

You can use NABIS to search for and locate any of over 50,000 named places within New Zealand

NABIS also holds the NZMS260 and NZMS262 series New Zealand topography maps, and the New Zealand hydrographic chart series. You can use NABIS to:

• Measure distances
• Draw rectangles or polygons onto maps
• Determine the area enclosed within a rectangle or polygon
• Select the units of measure that you want to use for both distance (kilometres, metres. or nautical miles) and area (square kilometres, square metres, hectares, or square nautical miles).

NABIS makes available maps showing areas with fishing restrictions including:

• Marine reserves
• Mataitai, Rohe moana, Taiapure and Temporary Closures
• Commercial fishing restrictions
• Amateur fishing restrictions
• Submarine cables and pipelines

Each map is accompanied by a comprehensive set of metadata which will help you determine whether the map is appropriate for your purposes.

There is an extensive set of maps of the areas used to administer New Zealand's fisheries quota contained within NABIS. These maps include:

• 92 maps of Quota Management Areas (QMA)
• 4 maps of Fisheries Management Areas (FMA)
• 7 maps of fisheries statistical areas
• A map of New Zealand's Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ)
• A map of New Zealand's Territorial Sea (TS)

You can use NABIS's "What's here?" tool to view the details associated with a given location on a given map (e.g. to find out when a particular area was certified).

If you have a spreadsheet of latitudes and longitudes for the area around New Zealand, you can use NABIS's "import my points" tool to plot the location of these.

The "Import my points" tool offers you the option of downloading a template to help you create your spreadsheet of latitudes and longitudes. This template contains some simple quality checks that will help you identify and correct problems "as you type".

You can view your latitudes and longitudes as individual points, poly lines, or polygons. You can attach a label to each point, which NABIS will then display.

The "Data view" tool will allow you to view the underlying data behind many NABIS maps in a tabular format. Data view allows you to search on, and sort by, the details associated with particular areas on a map. You can then choose to turn on/off the display of individual areas. For example:

• You can view a map showing the location of New Zealand's marine reserves
• Then switch to a table describing marine reserves
• Then sort the marine reserves by the date that they came into being
• Then re-display the map showing only the 5 most recent marine reserves