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.

The ‘Circa 1995 Landcover of the Prairies’dataset is a geospatial raster data layer portraying the rudimentaryland cover types of all grain-growing areas of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and northeastern British Columbia at a 30-metre resolution for the 1995 timeframe. It is the collection of all the classified imagery (1993 to 1995) of the Western Grain Transition Payment Program (WGTPP) assembled into a single seamless raster data layer.

This land cover data set was derived from the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) sensor operating on board the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellites. Information on the NOAA series of satellites can be found at www.noaa.gov/satellites.html The vegetation and land cover information set has been classified into twelve categories. Information on the classification of the vegetation and land cover, raster to vector conversion, generalization for cartographic presentations is included in the paper "The Canada Vegetation and Land Cover: A Raster and Vector Data Set for GIS Applications - Uses in Agriculture" (https://geogratis.cgdi.gc.ca/download/landcover/scale/gis95ppr.pdf). A soil quality evaluation was obtained by cross-referencing the AVHRR information with Census of Agriculture records and biophysical (Soil Landscapes of Canada) data and is also included in the above paper. AVHRR Land Cover Data approximates a 1:2M scale and was done originally for Agriculture Canada. The projection used is Lambert Conformal Conic (LCC) 49/77 with origin at 49N 95W.

BTM ( Baseline Thematic Mapping) Landsat Image Catalogue Acquisition Dates. This polygon coverage contains the date of capture of the Landsat images making up the seamless BC Landsat image catalogue. This is not a multipart feature

This data publication contains a set of files in which areas affected by fire or by harvest from 1984 to 2015 are identified at the level of individual 30m pixels on the Landsat grid. Details of the product development can be found in Guindon et al (2018). The change detection is based on reflectance-corrected yearly summer (July and August) Landsat mosaics from 1984 to 2015 created from individual scenes developed from USGS reflectance products (Masek et al, 2006; Vermote et al, 2006). Briefly, the change detection method uses a six-year temporal signature centered on the disturbance year to identify fire, harvest and no change. The signatures were derived from visually-interpreted disturbance or no-change polygons that were used to fit a decision tree model. The method detects about 91% of the areas harvested and 85% of the areas burned across Canada’s forests over the study period, but overestimates areas disturbed in the two initial and mostly in the two final years of the 1985 to 2015 time series. This is caused by the absence of appropriate pre-disturbance and post-disturbance data for the model-based detection and attribution. Disturbance coverage in those four years should therefore be used with caution. As in Guindon et al (2014), the method was designed to minimize commission errors and has a disturbance class attribution success rate of about 98%. The attribution success rate of disturbance year for fire is of about 69% for the exact year and of about 99% when attribution to the following year is also considered as a success. This common one-year lag is mostly due to the use of mid-summer Landsat mosaics for the analysis that will cause spring and fall events of the same year to be attributed to successive years. For example, a fire that occurred in the fall of 2004 (after July and August), will be detected and attributed to 2005, while for a fire that occurred in the spring of 2004 will be detected and attributed to 2004. The presence of clouds and shadows or image availability causes 10% of missing data annually and therefore can too delay the capture of events. The data provides uniform spatial and temporal information on fire and harvest across all provinces and territories of Canada and is intended for strategic-level analysis. Since no attention was given to other minor disturbances such as mining, road or flooding, the product should not be used for their identification. Finally, calibration datasets were developed for only three major forest pests (mountain pine beetle, eastern spruce budworm and forest tent caterpillar), but were folded within the “no-change” class in order to minimize commission errors for fire and harvest . Less common pests for which validation datasets are hard to develop were not considered and therefore could in rare circumstances generate false fire events. Considering that area having two (3.3%) to three disturbances (less than 1%) events are not common, only the most recent disturbance is provided, overlapping older disturbances in these rare case. ## Please cite this dataset as: Guindon, L., P. Villemaire, R. St-Amant, P.Y. Bernier, A. Beaudoin, F. Caron, M. Bonucelli and H. Dorion. 2017. Canada Landsat Disturbance (CanLaD): a Canada-wide Landsat-based 30-m resolution product of fire and harvest detection and attribution since 1984. https://doi.org/10.23687/add1346b-f632-4eb9-a83d-a662b38655ad ## Scientific article citation: The creation, validation and limitations of the CanLaD product are described in the Supplementary Material file associated with the following article: Guindon, L.; Bernier, P.Y.; Gauthier, S.; Stinson, G.; Villemaire, P.; Beaudoin, A. 2018. Missing forest cover gains in boreal forests explained. Ecosphere, 9 (1) Article e02094. doi:10.1002/ecs2.2094. ## Cited references: Masek, J.G., Vermote, E.F., Saleous N.E., Wolfe, R., Hall, F.G., Huemmrich, K.F., Gao, F., Kutler, J., and Lim, T-K. (2006). A Landsat surface reflectance dataset for North America, 1990–2000. IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters 3(1):68-72. http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/LGRS.2005.857030. Vermote, E., Justice, C., Claverie, M., & Franch, B. (2016). Preliminary analysis of the performance of the Landsat 8/OLI land surface reflectance product. Remote Sensing of Environment. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2016.04.008.

Organic soils in the boreal forest commonly store as much carbon as the vegetation above ground. While recent efforts through the National Forest Inventory has yielded new spatial datasets of forest structure across the vast area of Canada’s boreal forest, organic soils are poorly mapped. In this geospatial dataset, we produce a map primarily of forested and treed peatlands, those with more than 40 cm of peat accumulation and over 10% tree canopy cover. National Forest Inventory ground plots were used to identify the range of forest structure that corresponds to the presence of over 40 cm of peat soils. Areas containing that range of forest cover were identified using the National Forest Inventory k-NN forest structure maps and assigned a probability (0-100% as integer) of being a forested or treed peatland according to a statistical model. While this mapping product captures the distribution of forested and treed peatlands at a 250 m resolution, open, completely treeless peatlands are not fully captured by this mapping product as forest cover information was used to create the maps. The methodology used in the creation of this product is described in: Thompson DK, Simpson BN, Beaudoin A. 2016. Using forest structure to predict the distribution of treed boreal peatlands in Canada. Forest Ecology and Management, 372, 19-27. https://cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/publications?id=36751 This distribution uses an updated forest attribute layer current to 2011 from: Beaudoin A, Bernier PY, Villemaire P, Guindon L, Guo XJ. 2017. Species composition, forest properties and land cover types across Canada’s forests at 250m resolution for 2001 and 2011. Natural Resources Canada, Canadian Forest Service, Laurentian Forestry Centre, Quebec, Canada. https://doi.org/10.23687/ec9e2659-1c29-4ddb-87a2-6aced147a990 Additionally, this distribution varies slightly from the original published in 2016 in that here slope data is derived from the CDEM: https://open.canada.ca/data/en/dataset/7f245e4d-76c2-4caa-951a-45d1d2051333 The above peatland probability map was further processed to delineate bogs vs fens (based on mapped Larix content via the k-NN maps), as well as an approximation of the extent of open peatlands using EOSD data. The result is a 9-type peatland map with a more complete methodology as detailed in: Webster, K. L., Bhatti, J. S., Thompson, D. K., Nelson, S. A., Shaw, C. H., Bona, K. A., Hayne, S. L., & Kurz, W. A. (2018). Spatially-integrated estimates of net ecosystem exchange and methane fluxes from Canadian peatlands. Carbon Balance and Management, 13(1), 16. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13021-018-0105-5 In plain text, the legend for the 9-class map is as follows: value="0" label="not peat" alpha="0" value="1" label="Open Bog" alpha="255" color="#0a4b32" value="2" label="Open Poor Fen" alpha="255" color="#5c5430" value="3" label="Open Rich Fen" alpha="255" color="#792652" value="4" label="Treed Bog" alpha="255" color="#6a917b" value="5" label="Treed Poor Fen" alpha="255" color="#aba476" value="6" label="Treed Rich Fen" alpha="255" color="#af7a8f" value="7" label="Forested Bog" alpha="255" color="#aad7bf" value="8" label="Forested Poor Fen" alpha="255" color="#fbfabc" value="9" label="Forested Rich Fen" alpha="255" color="#ffb6db" This colour scale is given in qml/xml format in the resources below. The 9-type peatland map from Webster et al 2018 was further refined slightly following two simple conditions: (1) any 250-m raster cell with greater than 40% pine content is classified as upland (non-peat); (2) all 250-m raster cells classified as water or agriculture via the NRCan North American Land Cover Monitoring System (https://doi.org/10.3390/rs9111098) is also classified as non-peatland (value of zero in the 9-class map. This mapping scheme was used at a regional scale in the following paper: Thompson, D. K., Simpson, B. N., Whitman, E., Barber, Q. E., & Parisien, M.-A. (2019). Peatland Hydrological Dynamics as A Driver of Landscape Connectivity and Fire Activity in the Boreal Plain of Canada. Forests, 10(7), 534. https://doi.org/10.3390/f10070534 And is reproduced here at a national scale. Note that this mapping product does not fully capture all permafrost peatland features covered by open canopy spruce woodland with lichen ground cover. Nor are treeless peatlands near the northern treeline captured in the training data, resulting in unknown mapping quality in those regions.

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.

Topographic maps produced by Natural Resources Canada conform to the National Topographic System (NTS) of Canada. Indexes are available in three standard scales: 1:1,000,000, 1:250,000 and 1:50,000. The area covered by a given mapsheet is determined by its latitude and longitude. 1:1,000,000 mapsheets are identified by a combination of three numbers (e.g. 098). 1:250,000 mapsheets are identified by a combination of numbers, and letters ranging from A through P (e.g. 098C). Sixteen smaller segments (1 to 16) form blocks used for 1:50,000 mapping (e.g. 098C03).

Leaf area index (LAI) quantified the density of vegetation irrespective of land cover. LAI quantifies the total foliage surface area per groud surface area. LAI has been identified by the Global Climate Observing System as an essential climate variable required for ecosystem,weather and climate modelling and monitoring. This product consists of annual maps of the maximum LAI during a grownig season (June-July-August) at 100m resolution covering Canada's land mass.