The Cold Lake oil sands area - Township 56 to 69, Range 1 to 11, west of the 4th Meridian, falls within the Lower Athabasca Regional Plan (LARP). As part of Alberta's Land-use Framework, LARP was developed in 2012 to set the stage for robust growth, vibrant communities and a healthy environment within the region. One of its implementation objectives is to balance the economic development of oil sands and impacts on the ecosystem and environment. This is to be achieved through enhanced science-based monitoring for improved characterization of the environment and to collect the information necessary to understand cumulative effects. Landsat multispectral imagery for 2011 and 2012 and land use and land cover classification data derived from 2012 were used to produce this dataset. The land use and land cover changes include vegetation loss from anthropogenic disturbances, such as infrastructure related to oil and gas exploration, forestry and agriculture, and vegetation recovery from these disturbances. This digital data release contains the vegetation loss data from 2011 to 2012, classified into 9 classes: 1 - exposed land/cut blocks/harvested areas, 3 - transitional bare surfaces, 4 - mixed developed areas, 5 - developed areas, 6 - shoal, 7 - shrub land, 8 - grassland and 9 - agricultural areas. These categories can be used as baseline data for planning, managing and monitoring surface infrastructure needs and impacts.

Biogeoclimatic Ecosystem Classification (BEC) zone boundaries with percent protected, number of overlapping protected areas and other attributes added as a result of geoprocessing in the Protected Area System Overview (PASO) application. Protected area and park representation by BEC zone provides a zonal ecosystem context for natural resource planning processes such as; management plans, land use zoning, environmental risk assessment, landscape analysis, habitat supply, and management of high priority species. For important warnings about using this data for spatial analysis see the Data Quality section of the metadata

Water Stewardship Division, Water Management administrative areas. Water Districts are jurisdictional areas established by the WATER REGULATIONS

Fish holding areas (i.e. areas of concentration of salmon and herring, both adult and juvenile) in coastal British Columbia. Attribute information includes overall relative importance, species of salmon and other fish observed at various times throughout the year as well as information on spawning activity and larvae. CRIMS is a legacy dataset of BC coastal resource data that was acquired in a systematic and synoptic manner from 1979 and was intermittently updated throughout the years. Resource information was collected in nine study areas using a peer-reviewed provincial Resource Information Standards Committee consisting of DFO Fishery Officers, First Nations, and other subject matter experts. There are currently no plans to update this legacy data.

Fisheries Information Summary System (FISS) layer of Historic (pre 2001) Fish Distribution Points of BC Streams. Points represent site locations where a fish species is rearing, spawning or observed or where a point is located at the mouth of a stream it indicates the presence of a fish species somewhere in the stream as a whole. Georeferenced to the stream centreline network layer of the 1:50,000 scale BC Watershed Atlas.

The Provincial Obstacles to Fish Passage theme presents records of all known obstacles to fish passage from several fisheries datasets. Records from the following datasets have been included: The Fisheries Information Summary System (FISS); the Fish Habitat Inventory and Information Program (FHIIP); the Field Data Information System (FDIS) and the Resource Analysis Branch (RAB) inventory studies. The main intent of this layer is to have a single layer of all known obstacles to fish passage. It is important to note that not all waterbodies have been studied and, not all lengths of many waterbodies have been studied so there are a very high number of obstacles in the real world that are not recorded in this dataset. This layer simply reports the obstacles to fish that are known. It is also very important to note that we are acknowledging these features as obstacles to fish passage versus barriers to fish passage. This is because an obstacle may be a barrier at one time of year but not at other times depending on the volume of water present and also, what is a barrier to one species of fish is not necessarily a barrier to another species.

All fundamental watershed polygons generated from watershed boundary lines, bank edges, delimiter edges, coastline edges, and administrative boundary edges

Coal zone boundary for the Mannville Coal Zone is based on subcrops generated by Alberta Geological Survey Special Report 007 (Regional Evaluation of the Coalbed Methane Potential in the Plains and Foothills of Alberta, Stratigraphy and Rank Study). We used additional coal picks from various sources to refine the boundary.

Bioterrain (TBT) contains polygons with key and amalgamated (concatenated) attributes derived from the RISC (Resource Inventory Standards Committee) standard attributes. TBT divides the landscape into units using the Terrain Classification System for British Columbia and ecological criteria. Polygon attributes include (but are not limited to) surficial material, surface expression, geomorphological processes, drainage class and aspect. TBT methods include manual air photo interpretation supported by selective field checking. Bioterrain mapping is integral to ecosystem mapping and its derivative products. This layer is derived from the STE_TEI_ATTRIBUTE_POLYS_SP layer by filtering on the PROJECT_TYPE attribute. Project types include: TEM, TEMNSS, TEMPRE, TEMSEI, TEMSET, TEMTSM, TBS, TBT, TEMWHR, TEMSDM, TEMPRW, and TEMSEW. Current version: v11 (published on 2024-10-03) Previous versions: v10 (published on 2023-11-14), v9 (published on 2023-03-01), v8 (published on 2016-09-01)

The Single Line Hydrography Network (SLNET) contains all captured single line representations of hydrographic features. In addition, single line representations of polygonal features and single line arbitrary network connectors are in the file.