Forest Gross Stem Volume Estimates for Canada at 30m Resolution, 2015

Forest gross stem volume estimates for approximately 650 million hectares of Canada's forested ecosystems. The data was generated by Natural Resources Canada using a combination of lidar plots and Landsat imagery with a Random Forests-based imputation approach. Products have a spatial resolution of 30 meters and are intended for strategic-level forest monitoring, not operational management.

Use Cases

• Modeling forest carbon stocks based on gross stem volume estimates.
• Monitoring changes in forest structure over time based on the Landsat time-series methodology.
• Strategic-level forest resource assessment based on the 30-meter resolution spatial data.
• Calibrating or validating other forest inventory models using the peer-reviewed, area-based approach.

Strengths

• Covers approximately 650 million hectares of Canada's forested ecosystems.
• Based on peer-reviewed science and methods described in Matasci et al. (2018).
• Integrates multiple data sources including lidar plots and Landsat pixel-based composites.
• Provides a consistent 30-meter spatial resolution across the entire geographic extent.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Data may reflect geographic bias inherent to the focus on Canada's forested ecosystems.
• Explicitly not intended to support operational-level forest management decisions.

Provenance

Source

Natural Resources Canada

Collection Method

Individual tree volumes calculated with species-specific allometry, then imputed to Landsat pixels using a Random Forests-based nearest neighbour approach with lidar and ground plot data.

Time Range

1985–2011 (time-series), with a snapshot product for 2015.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-16 16:04:15.803662; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Canada's forested ecosystems (~650 Mha)