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

3.1 Land Class
Land class is a description of land cover, as recorded in source inventories from various observation
platforms. Since the 1991 inventory was completed, CanFI2001 has expanded the number of land classes
from 7 to 62. This expansion reflects a cultural change from wanting to know how much timber is available
to a need for more all-encompassing knowledge of the land and what is on it.
Figure 8 shows distribution of land classes across Canada. In the farming regions of southern Ontario,
the prairies, and Alberta’s Peace River region, the dominant land class is agriculture. The main forested
area of Canada—shown by the dark green band—extends from Newfoundland through to the western
Northwest Territories. The high mountainous regions of British Columbia and the Yukon are naturally
non-vegetated. Northwest Territories, Nunavut and the northern regions of Labrador, Quebec, Ontario and
Manitoba are classed as vegetated non-treed. For the few areas for which information is missing, the data
sources were unable to determine land cover: for example, if land was obscured by cloud, the classification
of satellite imagery would not have been able to distinguish a land class.
Figure 9 shows percentage of vegetated land for each CanFI2001 mapping unit. Only about 13% of
the country is less than 20% vegetated. Most of these areas occur in Canada’s far north, in the mountains
of British Columbia and the Yukon, in northern Saskatchewan and Manitoba, and into the Northwest
Territories and Nunavut.
The extent and amount of forest and other wooded land are shown in Figure 10. Forest and other
wooded land do not occur in Canada’s north (Nunavut, Northwest Territories, and northern Quebec and
Labrador) nor in the agricultural areas of the prairie provinces and southern Ontario. Figure 11 shows the
extent and amount of forest land.
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