Canada Forest Water Bodies Map for 2022 at 30-Meter Resolution

2022 wall-to-wall map of water bodies across Canada's forested ecosystems, derived from the Virtual Land Cover of Engine (VLCE) product. It is developed by Natural Resources Canada within the National Terrestrial Ecosystem Monitoring System framework. The VLCE maps represent annual land cover classifications from 1984 to 2022 at a 30-meter spatial resolution.

Use Cases

• Monitor changes in forest water bodies over time based on the 1984-2022 annual time series.
• Model hydrological variables based on the integration of topographic and hydrologic ancillary data.
• Assess regional land cover classifications based on the 150x150 km tiling system.
• Refine land cover mapping consistency based on the application of a Hidden Markov Model.

Strengths

• Provides annual land cover classifications from 1984 to 2022, offering a 39-year time series.
• Uses a 30-meter spatial resolution derived from Landsat image time-series composites.
• Classification process integrates forest change information and ancillary topographic and hydrologic variables.
• Training data are drawn from multiple land cover sources and selected proportionally to land cover distributions.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.

Provenance

Source

Natural Resources Canada

Collection Method

Derived from the 'water' class of the annual Virtual Land Cover of Engine (VLCE) product, based on Landsat image time-series composites.

Time Range

1984 to 2022

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-16 16:02:31.590654; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Canada's forested ecosystems