The “Soils of Canada, Derived” national scale thematic datasets display the distribution and areal extent of soil attributes such as drainage, texture of parent material, kind of material, and classification of soils in terms of provincial Detailed Soil Surveys (DDS) polygons, Soil Landscape Polygons (SLCs), Soil Order and Great Group. The relief and associated slopes of the Canadian landscape are depicted on the local surface form thematic dataset. The purpose of the “Soils of Canada, Derived” series is to facilitate the cartographic display and basic queries of the Soil Landscapes of Canada at a national scale. For more detailed or sophisticated analysis, users should investigate the full “Soil Landscapes of Canada” product.

McElhanney Consulting Services Ltd (MCSL) has performed a LiDAR and Imagery survey in southern Saskatchewan. The acquisition was completed between the 16th and 25th of October, 2009. The survey consisted of approximately 790 square kilometers of coverage. While collecting the LiDAR data, we also acquired aerial photo in RGB and NIR modes consisting of 1649 frames each.

The AAFC Infrastructure Flood Mapping in Saskatchewan 20 centimeter colour orthophotos is a collection of georeferenced color digital orthophotos with 20 cm pixel size. The imagery was delivered in GeoTIF and ECW formats. The TIF and ECW mosaics were delivered in the same 1 km x 1 km tiles as the LiDAR data, and complete mosaics for each area in MrSID format were also provided. The digital photos were orthorectified using the ground model created from the DTM Key Points. With orthorectification, only features on the surface of the ground are correctly positioned in the orthophotos. Objects above the surface of the ground, such as building rooftops and trees, may contain horizontal displacement due to image parallax experienced when the photos were captured. This is sometimes apparent along the cut lines between photos. For positioning of above-ground structures it is recommended to use the LiDAR point clouds for accurate horizontal placement.

The “Land Cover for Agricultural Regions of Canada (circa 2000), Date Index” dataset is a geospatial data layer containing polygon features representing the Landsat scene number, associated dates and other products that were incorporated into the thematic land cover classification which is contained within the AAFC Landcover (circa 2000) product.

The MODIS Surface Albedo and Surface Reflectance Dataset (or simply Albedo) includes times series of 10-day composite products derived at 250-m spatial resolution over Canadian territory and neighboring areas produced at the Canada Centre for Remote Sensing (CCRS) since February 2000.The datasets contain spectral and broadband reflectance’s and albedo for MODIS bands B1-B7 designed primarily for land applications. The imagery for all spectral bands was downscaled and re-projected into the Lambert Conformal Conic (LCC) projection at 250-m spatial resolution. The area size is 5,700 km × 4,800 km. The specialized MODIS processing system was developed at CCRS to fully utilize the high quality of MODIS L2 swath imagery over the northern latitudes. As such, the CCRS Albedo product is different from the standard NASA product. The differences are related to temporal and spatial scaling, shape of kernel functions employed to fit data, as well as details of scene identification, atmospheric correction, and data fitting methodology. The data is hosted on AWS; users can follow the tutorial (https://github.com/OpsCCRS/AWS-Open-Data-Registry-Preparation/blob/main/CCRSMODISAlbedo/get-to-know-adataset-CCRSMODISAlbedo.ipynb) to access the data or via the URL in Data Resources for each year.