Annual Forest Harvest Mapping for Canada from 1985 to 2015

31 years of national-level forest harvesting activity across Canada's 650 million hectare forested ecosystems. This dataset was developed by Natural Resources Canada using automated analysis of Landsat satellite imagery with 30-meter spatial resolution. It provides two consistent, spatially-explicit layers: a binary harvest mask and the year of harvest disturbance detection.

Use Cases

• Modeling forest carbon flux and sequestration based on annual harvest disturbance data.
• Analyzing long-term trends in industrial forestry activity across Canada.
• Validating or calibrating regional land-use change models based on the 30-meter resolution satellite-derived maps.
• Assessing the spatial footprint and temporal patterns of stand-replacing forest disturbances.

Strengths

• Covers a 31-year time series from 1985 to 2015.
• Derived from a single, consistent data source (Landsat) using an automated protocol.
• Spatially explicit with 30-meter resolution across Canada's 650 million hectare forested area.
• Includes independent accuracy assessment as referenced in the provided scientific literature.

Limitations

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

Provenance

Source

Natural Resources Canada, developed within the National Terrestrial Ecosystem Monitoring System (NTEMS) framework.

Collection Method

Automated time-series change detection applied to annual gap-free Landsat surface reflectance composites.

Time Range

1985 to 2015

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03 16:05:25.030999; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Canada