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

2.8 Data Summaries and Display
Data in the CanFI2001 database can be summarized and displayed as tables and maps, or portions may be
exported as text files for analysis by the client.
Tabular summaries can be created for the entire country, or for each province, forest region, ecozone
or any other region that has been intersected with the summary unit coverage in the GIS. The attributes in
the tables can be area, volume or biomass, expressed as units or percent, and can be presented in two- and
three-way formats by various classifiers.
Mapping of data from CanFI2001 is based on a single value for each mapping unit. A mapping unit
may be, for example, an inventory summary unit, an ecozone or a province. The data can be summarized
in a number of ways to provide a value for a mapping unit: the condition with the most area in a mapping
unit; the area of a condition as a percent of the total area of a mapping unit; the per-hectare volume or
biomass; of a condition; or the presence (or absence) of a condition.
Clients such as the National Forest Carbon Monitoring and Reporting System, which models
Canada’s forests’ carbon budgets, often require a subset of the CanFI data to do their work. Such subsets
may be produced and displayed for a defined area (e.g., a group of ecozones), or for a selected set of
classifiers.
3. Inventory Results
CanFI2001 is the first national forest inventory to cover the entire land mass of Canada. According to
CanFI2001, the total area of land and fresh water in Canada is 979.1 million ha. This value varies by less
than 2% from the value of 998.5 million ha reported by Statistics Canada (2005). The difference is due to
the differing spatial resolutions of the data sources used.
Forest and other wooded land covers 402.1 million ha, representing 41% of the country, whereas the
portion that is forest (310.1 million ha) makes up about 32% of Canada’s area (Table 3). Figure 6 shows
relative total area and forest and other wooded land by province. Nunavut has the largest total area, but
only 0.8 million ha—the smallest area—of forest and other wooded land. Quebec and Ontario have more
forest and other wooded land than British Columbia does, but the percentage of forest and other wooded
land compared to the total provincial area is highest in British Columbia, at almost 68%, compared to
63% for Ontario and 56% for Quebec.
Of the total 29 383 million m 3 in wood volume, 77% is coniferous and 23% is broadleaved (Table 4).
Figure 7 shows that the trees growing in British Columbia are very large: they make up 36% of the
forest volume in Canada, despite growing on only 19% of Canada’s forest area. Almost 94% of British
Columbia’s wood volume is coniferous. Ontario and Quebec have the next highest total volumes, along
with the highest percentage of broadleaved volume, at 37% and 31% respectively.
12