Canada Harmonized Agriculture Forest Land Cover Map for 2015 at 30-Meter Resolution

Canada's harmonized land cover map for 2015, produced by Natural Resources Canada from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada and Canadian Forest Service data. It covers all area from the northern edge of Canada's forested ecosystems to the southern border, following IPCC categories at a 30-meter spatial resolution. The map was created using a Latent Dirichlet Allocation model to harmonize two sector-driven land cover products.

Use Cases

• Modeling land use change and carbon sequestration based on IPCC land cover categories.
• Analyzing agricultural and forest ecosystem boundaries based on the harmonized 30-meter resolution map.
• Conducting regional environmental assessments based on the exhaustive coverage from northern forests to the southern border.
• Validating remote sensing classification algorithms based on the statistically harmonized labels from multiple source maps.

Strengths

• Spatial resolution is explicitly stated as 30 meters.
• Coverage is exhaustive from Canada's northern forest edge to its southern border.
• Based on two established source products: the CFS Virtual Land Cover Engine and AAFC's Annual Crop Inventory.
• Harmonization method is documented, using a Latent Dirichlet Allocation model with independent accuracy assessment.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Data represents a single year (2015), limiting temporal analysis.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for large-scale computational tasks.

Provenance

Source

Natural Resources Canada, combining data from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada and the Canadian Forest Service.

Collection Method

Harmonization of two land cover products using a Latent Dirichlet Allocation model on regionalized class co-occurrences.

Time Range

2015

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-16 16:05:07.843860; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Canada, from the northern edge of forested ecosystems to the southern border.