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.

Our Imagery Base Maps and Mosaics of a number of Raster Datasets.  This includes the ASTER DEM, CDED and Shaded Relief Datasets.  As well as a number of mosaics, including SPOT, RapidEye, Landsat, and MVI Landcover data.

CHS offers 500-metre bathymetric gridded data for users interested in the topography of the seafloor. This data provides seafloor depth in metres and is accessible for download as predefined areas.

Mackenzie Valley Air Photo Digital Orthotiles

This dataset includes the extent of the boreal forest as well as the extent of managed boreal forest worldwide. The extent of boreal forest was produced from Brandt et al. (2013) and a modified version of Goudilin (1987). Managed forest was defined as suggested by IPCC (2003) using data from FAFS (2009), Gauthier et al. (2014), See et al. (2015) and AICC maps. The extent of managed forest mostly includes areas managed for wood production, areas protected from large-scale disturbances as well as formal protected areas. Both boreal forest extent and managed boreal forest extent are available in raster and vector data. Please cite this data product as: Boucher, D., D.G. Schepaschenko, S. Gauthier, P. Bernier, T. Kuuluvainen, A. Z. Shvidenko. 2024. World boreal forest and managed boreal forest extent. DOI: 10.23687/88d70716-2600-4995-8d5f-86f96e383abf These data were presented in the following article: Gauthier, S., P. Bernier, T. Kuuluvainen, A. Z. Shvidenko, D. G. Schepaschenko. 2015. Boreal forest health and global change. Science 349:819-822. DOI: 10.1126/science.aaa9092 References: J. P. Brandt, M. D. Flannigan, D. G. Maynard, I. D. Thompson, W. J. A. Volney, Environ. Rev. 21, 207–226 (2013) I. S. Goudilin, Landscape map of the USSR. Legend to the landscape map of the USSR. Scale 1:2 500 000. Moscow, Ministry of Geology of the USSR (1987) [in Russian]. Inter-governmental panel on climate change (IPCC). J. Penman, M. Gytarsky, T. Hiraishi, T. Krug, D. Kruger, et al., Eds., Good practice guidance for land use, land-use change and forestry (IPCC/NGGIP/IGES, Kanawaga, 2003) Federal Agency of Forest Service (FAFS), Forest Fund of the Russian Federation (state by 1 January 2009) (Federal Agency of Forest Service, Moscow, 2009) [in Russian] S. Gauthier et al., Environ. Rev. 22, 256–285 (2014). See et al., Harnessing the power of volunteers, the internet and Google Earth to collect and validate global spatial information using Geo-Wiki. Technological Forecasting and Social Change. (2015). doi:10.1016/j.techfore.2015.03.002 Alaska Interagency Coordination Center (AICC). Fire Information. https://fire.ak.blm.gov/content/maps/aicc/Large%20Maps/Alaska_Fire_Management_Options.pdf (the version of 2014 was used)

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.

IBL - Imagery, basemaps, and land cover (imageryBaseMapsEarthCover) Basemaps. For example, resources describing land cover, topographic maps, and classified and unclassified images

The Canada Centre for Mapping and Earth Observation (CCMEO) has created a 30m resolution radar mosaic of Canada's landmass from the RADARSAT Constellation Mission (RCM). This product highlights different types of radar interaction with the surface, which can assist the interpretation and study of land cover on a national scale. The national mosaic is made up of 3222 RCM images acquired between August 2023 and February 2024. (Credit: RADARSAT Constellation Mission imagery © Government of Canada [2024]. RADARSAT is an official mark of the CSA.)

Data include a collection of annual land cover maps derived from MODIS 250 m spatial resolution remotely sensed imagery for the period 2000 to 2011. Processing of the time series was designed to reduce the occurrence of false change between maps. The method was based on change updating as described in Pouliot et al. (2011, 2013). Change detection accounted for both abrupt changes such as forest harvesting and more gradual changes such as recurrent insect defoliation. To determine the new label for a pixel identified as change, an evidential reasoning approach was used to combine spectral and contextual information. The 2005 MODIS land cover of Canada at 250 m spatial resolution described in Latifovic et al. (2012) was used as the base map. It contains 39 land cover classes, which for time series development was considered too detailed and was reduced to 25 and 19 class versions. The 19 class version corresponds to the North America Land Change Monitoring System (NALCMS) Level 2 legend as described in Latifovic et al. (2012). Accuracy assessment of time series is difficult due to the need to assess many maps. For areas of change in the time series accuracy was found to be 70% based on the 19 class thematic legend. This time series captures the spatial distribution of dominant land cover transitions. It is intended for use in modeling, development of remote sensing products such as leaf area index or land cover based albedo retrievals, and other exploratory analysis. It is not appropriate for use in any rigorous reporting or inventory assessments due to the accuracy of the land cover classification and uncertainty as to the capture of all relevant changes for an application.