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

Table 5 lists the area for each of the non-vegetated land classes (defined in Appendix II) occurring
in CanFI2001. Table 6 lists the area, total volume and biomass for the vegetated land classes. Table 7
summarizes area by land-class groups and province and territory. Forest land covers most of Canada, with
naturally vegetated non-treed land cover being the second most abundant land classification. Fresh water
features cover 9% of Canada. Less than 1% of the country lacks information regarding land cover, mostly
because the data sources for these areas included satellite imagery with land-obscuring cloud.
3.2 Ownership
The owner of a forest is responsible for its management. In CanFI2001, ownership of all lands is divided
into federal crown land (including national parks, Department of National Defence land and the three
territories), provincial crown land, First Nations land (Indian reserves), municipal lands, and private land.
The private land has been classified, where information was provided, into industrial land (owned by a
large corporate industry for commercial forestry purposes) and non-industrial land (owned by corporations
or individuals that may or may not be used for commercial forestry purposes).
For all of Canada, about 91% of the total area is owned by the Crown (including First Nations land),
with the rest being private (Figure 12). Large forest industry companies own 5% of privately owned land
in Canada; the majority of private land (62%) is owned by nonindustrial owners, and the rest (33%) is
owned with no indication of whether the owners are industrial or nonindustrial.
Area of forest and other wooded land is listed by ownership category in Table 8. Figure 13 shows the
relative percent of ownership class for each province and territory. Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia and
New Brunswick have more private land than crown land; this situation is reversed in the other provinces.
All forest and other wooded land in the territories is owned by the federal Crown. Across Canada, forest
and other wooded land is about 93% publicly owned. This contrasts with the situation in the United States
and many western European countries, where most forest and other wooded land is privately owned
(United States, 58%; Austria, 80%; France, 76%; Norway, 83%; FAO 2006). Ownership of forest land by
province and territory is listed in Appendix I: Table I-3.
Provincial crown
51%
Private
9%
18
Unclassified
0%
Figure 12. Total area by ownership class.
Federal crown
40%