Land Use Atlas for 109 Coastal Watersheds in Atlantic Canada

Land use maps provide statistics for 109 coastal watersheds draining into the Scotian Shelf Bioregion. The atlas compiles data on land cover types, human population density, building locations, and riverine pour points to support coastal ecosystem assessments. It was funded by Fisheries and Oceans Canada and published in 2022.

Use Cases

• Analyze the relationship between land cover types like forested areas or agricultural areas and riverine pour point locations to model nutrient runoff.
• Assess coastal development pressure by correlating human population density and building locations within watersheds.
• Model potential eutrophication risk using statistics on impervious surfaces and agricultural areas as proxies for anthropogenic nitrogen loading.
• Support marine spatial planning by integrating data on parks and protected areas with other land use statistics for impact assessments.

Strengths

• Covers 109 distinct coastal watersheds, providing a systematic regional analysis.
• Integrates multiple data themes including land cover, population density, and infrastructure from various public spatial sources.
• Includes an associated peer-reviewed publication validating the data's application in studying anthropogenic nitrogen loading.

Limitations

• The specific row count and column structure for the tabular (CSV) data are unknown, limiting pre-analysis assessment of its scale.
• As a compiled atlas from various sources, data consistency and temporal alignment across the 109 watersheds may vary.
• The underlying source data's original collection dates are not specified, which may affect the recency of specific statistics like building locations.

Provenance

Source

Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Coastal Ecosystems Science Division.

Collection Method

Information compiled from various national and provincial publicly available spatial data sources to create land use maps.

Freshness

The dataset metadata was last updated in March 2026, but the core atlas was published in 2022.

Geography

Coastal watersheds draining into the Scotian Shelf Bioregion, in the Maritimes Region of Atlantic Canada.