Treed Area Dynamics in Canada from 1984 to 2022

Natural Resources Canada provides annual treed area dynamics across 650 million hectares of forested ecosystems from 1984 to 2022. The data is derived from Landsat-based land cover layers at a 30-meter spatial resolution and identifies areas that remained treed, became newly treed, or transitioned away from being treed. This dataset supports national and regional assessments of long-term forest change, post-disturbance recovery, and shifts in forest extent.

Use Cases

• Modeling forest recovery after disturbances based on the 'was-treed' and 'newly treed' transition classes.
• Assessing long-term trends in forest extent across Canada's 650 Mha forested ecosystems.
• Conducting regional analyses of land cover change using the 30-meter spatial resolution data.
• Validating ecological models with annual land cover layers spanning from 1984 to 2022.

Strengths

• Covers a 39-year time series from 1984 to 2022.
• Provides national coverage of 650 million hectares of forested ecosystems.
• Offers high spatial resolution at 30 meters derived from Landsat imagery.
• Distinguishes three specific transition states: remained treed, newly treed, and was-treed.

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, developed within the National Terrestrial Ecosystem Monitoring System (NTEMS).

Collection Method

Derived from Landsat-based annual land cover layers.

Time Range

1984 to 2022

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-16 16:03:23.015105; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Canada