AAFC’s Canadian Ag-Land Monitoring System (CALMS), operational since 2009, was developed by AAFC’s Earth Observation Service (EOS) to deliver weekly NDVI-based maps of crop condition in near-real-time. The CALMS uses data collected by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectro-radiometer (MODIS), a sensor mounted onboard NASA’s Terra satellite that has been acquiring data since February 2000. The state-of-the-art radiometric, spectral and spatial resolutions of MODIS Terra make it particularly well-suited for large-scale vegetation mapping and assessment. Crop condition (NDVI) maps are generated weekly by AAFC throughout Canada’s growing season, the period defined as the six-month period stretching from the start of Julian week 12 (end of March) to the end of Julian week 44 (late October). Weeks of the year are defined according to the ISO 8601 week-numbering standard, where weeks start on a Monday and end the following Sunday. CALMS products are generated in the MODIS native Integrated Sinusoidal (ISIN) projection for the region covering the twelve MODIS tiles h09v03 to h14v03 and h09v04 to h14v04.

Heat Wave represents the consecutive number of days (April 1 – October 31) where the maximum daily temperature is greater than 25 or 30 degrees respectively. Heat wave products are only generated during the Growing Season, April 1 through October 31.

Each pixel value corresponds to the quality control, cloud cover and snow fraction value for each pixel in the Best-Quality Max-NDVI product.

Moored instrument time series data include current velocity, temperature, salinity, oxygen, fluorescence, transmissivity, turbidity, and particle capture of carbon, nitrogen, and silicon as well as sediment trap, ice drift and ice draft data. These data were collected by researchers from the Institute of Ocean Sciences, Sidney, BC, from locations ranging from the North Pacific, the Beaufort Sea, and across the Canadian Arctic Archipelago to Baffin Bay.

The Census of Agriculture is disseminated by Statistics Canada's standard geographic units (boundaries). Since these census units do not reflect or correspond with biophysical landscape units (such as ecological regions, soil landscapes or drainage areas), Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada in collaboration with Statistics Canada's Agriculture Division, have developed a process for interpolating (reallocating or proportioning) Census of Agriculture information from census polygon-based units to biophysical polygon-based units. In the “Interpolated census of agriculture”, suppression confidentiality procedures were applied by Statistics Canada to the custom tabulations to prevent the possibility of associating statistical data with any specific identifiable agricultural operation or individual. Confidentiality flags are denoted where "-1" appears in data cell. This indicates information has been suppressed by Statistics Canada to protect confidentiality. Null values/cells simply indicate no data is reported.

LiDAR Services International (LSI), a Calgary-based LiDAR company completed an airborne LiDAR survey for the Redberry Lake Biosphere Reserve (RLBR) and Agriculture and Agri-Foods Canada (AAFC) in October 2011. The project involved collection of LiDAR data for a 362.97 km2 block area, 252.77 km2 for Redberry Lake and 110.20 km2 for AAFC northwest of Saskatoon, SK. Deliverables included: • 1 m bare earth and full feature grids in 1 km x 1 km tiles (ASCII XYZ format) • 1 m bare earth and full feature greyscale hillshades (GeoGeoTIF format) • Classified LiDAR point clouds and ASCII extractor program (LAS v1.2 format)

Description: Seasonal climatologies (temperature, salinity, sigma-t, and elevation) of the Northeast Pacific Ocean were computed from historical observations including all available conductivity-temperature-depth (CTD), bottle, expendable bathy-thermograph (XBT), and Argo data in NOAA (http://www.argo.ucsd.edu/), Marine Environmental Data Service (MEDS), and Institute of Ocean Sciences archives over 1980 to 2010 period. Methods: Calculations, including smooth and interpolation, were carried out in sixty-five subregions and up to fifty-two vertical levels from surface to 5000m. Seasonal averages were computed as the median of yearly seasonal values. Spring months were defined as April to June, summer months were defined as July to September, fall months were defined as October to December, and winter months were defined as January to March. The data available here contain raster layers of seasonal climatologies (temperature, salinity, sigma-t, and elevation) for the Canadian Pacific Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), a subset of seasonal climatologies of the Northeast Pacific Ocean, in high spatial resolution of 1/300 degree. Uncertainties: Uncertainties are introduced when quality controlled observational data are spatially interpolated to varying distances from the observation point. Climatological averages are calculated from these interpolated values.

The objectives of the fish component of the integrated oil sands monitoring program are to provide the necessary data/information to address key questions related to both environmental health of fish populations and fish health issues that can be used to inform human use and consumption. The questions underlying the fish monitoring design are related to the status and health of wild fish populations in the Lower Athabasca River including and in an expanded geographical extent. Data is being collected to provide a baseline against which future changes in fish populations will be evaluated, and compared to data from historical studies to assess change over time to the current state. Data is also being collected in areas of new oil sands development, to develop baseline data for future site-specific comparisons, contribute to an expanded geographic basis of the overall monitoring plan, and contribute to an improved ability to examine cumulative effects.