Canada's Forest Inventory 2001 - Publications du gouvernement du ...

standards, definitions and measurement protocols have changed. Provincial forest management inventory
databases typically contain information from several inventory cycles.
Federal government responsibilities relating to forest inventory lie in the areas of research and
development, the inventory of federally administered forest lands, and in the compilation and reporting of
a national forest inventory. The current national inventory, Canada’s Forest Inventory 2001 (CanFI2001),
is a compilation of stand-level provincial data from forest management inventories. CanFI2001 is derived
from a number of sources, including management, regional, and reconnaissance-level inventories, satellite
imagery, and other surveys (e.g., ecological land classification of national parks). The latter two types of
sources were used for areas where provincial forest management inventory data were not available.
In order for source data to be combined into CanFI2001, a national database format and coding
scheme were developed. Protocols to convert each source dataset to CanFI2001 specifications were
developed in cooperation with each data provider. These data are the attribute data in CanFI2001, which
describes the land cover in each inventory summary unit using 16 classifiers and numerical attributes of
area and wood volume.
Although the basic geographic summary unit of forest management inventories is the forest stand,
forest-stand boundaries are not retained in CanFI2001. The basic geographic summary unit in CanFI2001
is the inventory summary unit (Figure 1), generally equivalent to a forest management inventory map
sheet. Table 1 shows the range of areas of maps that are not along a coast or border, as used in CanFI2001.
After each stand has been coded according to the national classifiers, similar stands are aggregated (i.e.,
the area and volume are summed). The number of records for each summary unit varies depending on the
data source and the complexity of the land cover classes.
Besides storing attribute data in a relational database, CanFI2001 also stores the geographic data in
a geographic information system (GIS) that contains summary-unit location information for mapping
purposes. The GIS also allows summary units to be combined with other geographic data, such as forest
regions, ecozones and road networks, for geographic analyses of attribute data.
2.2 Data Sources and Inventory Types
Data from 48 different sources from the 13 provinces and territories—totalling 58 inventory phases—
make up CanFI2001. The inventory sources used in the creation of CanFI2001 (listed in Appendix I:
Table I-1) can be grouped into five categories, ranked here from the newest and most detailed to inventories
carried out for other purposes:
1. New forest or vegetation resource inventory (management inventory);
2. Older forest or vegetation inventory data resubmitted to CanFI (management inventory);
3. Data re-used from earlier version of CanFI (reconnaissance, regional or management);
4. Satellite imagery;
5. Other surveys.
Table 2, a summary of Appendix I: Table I-1, shows that, in CanFI2001, data for more than half the
area of Canada are from satellite imagery, and more than a quarter are from new or newly submitted
provincial and territorial inventories. About 12% of the data is re-used from CanFI1991, about 4% from
old provincial or territorial datasets resubmitted and recoded to CanFI2001, and the remaining data
originate from ecological studies of national parks or other studies, or were added by the Canadian Forest
Service.
2