What's New

September 30, 2020

Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) is pleased to announce a new publication of the High-Resolution Digital Elevation Model (HRDEM).This new publication brings the total area of LiDAR-derived HRDEM to 385 000 km², an increase of 50 000 km² since the last update in October 2019.

This new data is distributed across six provinces: Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec and Prince Edward Island (see the map below). 51 of Canada's 100 largest cities are now covered by the HRDEM product. This new data also covers areas vulnerable to flooding, including the Ottawa River and Fort McMurray regions. The LiDAR acquisitions for these two regions were funded by the Emergency Management Strategy for Canada.

This new highly detailed 3D information (see the images below) is an essential baseline for many government projects and priorities, such as flood mapping, forest inventories, climate change monitoring and urban management (e.g. smart cities).

For more information on the HRDEM product, consult the product specifications.

Explore the data!

You can download HRDEM data from the Open Government Portal. Use one of the following options to view the current inventory and to download datasets: "View on Map", "Project Footprints" or "Dataset Footprints", in KML, Shapefile or ESRI REST formats.

Instructions for downloading the MNEHR product are now available.

About the National Elevation Data Strategy

The National Elevation Data Strategy aims to increase high-resolution elevation data coverage for Canada and improve accessibility to the products. Collaboration with various partners is a key factor in the success of the Strategy, both to release existing data and to acquire new LiDAR data across the country. The HRDEM product is part of the CanElevation Series created in support of the National Elevation Data Strategy.

Legend: HRDEM coverage map as of September 2020

Legend: Shaded 3D reliefs of the Digital Surface Model (top image) and the Digital Terrain Model (bottom image) covering the Chaudière River near Beauceville, Qc.

Legend: Shaded 3D reliefs of the Digital Surface Model (top image) and the Digital Terrain Model (bottom image) covering part of the North of Edmonton, AB.

Legend: Shaded 3D reliefs of the Digital Surface Model (top image) and the Digital Terrain Model (bottom image) covering part of the Jasper National Park, AB.

Natural Resources Canada wishes to inform you that as of April 1, 2020, certain geospatial products will no longer be corrected or maintained. They may not meet current government standards. However, they will still be available to the public.

Other products that have reached the end of their life-cycle will either be replaced or removed.

December 20, 2019

The CanVec product includes the following modifications:

• Administrative boundaries at 1 :50 000 and 1 :250 000 scales are not anymore included in the CanVec product.
• The territorial sea limits and the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) limits were modified to correspond to those of Fisheries and Oceans Canada.
• CanVec is now available in OGC GeoPackage.
• The GML format is not available anymore for the CanVec product.
• Adding of attributes display_priority for the toponymic entity classes.
• Adding of attributes geom_db for the toponymic entity classes.

Please see the CanVec Release notes for more details.

Access CanVec data as pre-packaged files through the FTP site, or by defining a custom area for downloading through the Geospatial Data Extraction tool.

December 9, 2019

Larger image

Text version

View of the geographic extent of new buildings in New Brunswick and Manitoba superimposed on the Canada base map.

Natural Resources Canada is pleased to announce the release of more than 300,000 new buildings in New Brunswick and Manitoba for the automatically extracted building product. The data layer now includes more than 1.4 million buildings. New buildings data will be made available as new LiDAR data is acquired in Canada.

Explore the data!

You can access Automatically Extracted Buildings data and documentation from the Open Government Portal. WMS, Web Application and prepackaged FGDB and Shapefiles are available.

November 28, 2019

The Canada Centre for Remote Sensing (CCRS) at Natural Resources Canada produced this second high-resolution dataset of Canada’s 15 land cover classes from 13,704 Landsat-8 satellite images taken between 2014 and 2016 for cloud- and snow-free national coverage. The 30-metre resolution of the dataset will help improve the accuracy of local and regional-scale analyses and applications, including the identification of land cover changes against the 2010 baseline dataset released in April 2019.

Download the data!

Access the 30-metre resolution land cover dataset on the Open Government Portal.

Explore the web map!

Navigate across Canada’s 15 land cover classes online at The Atlas of Canada

Get the poster!

Download and print Canada’s Land Cover poster (English/French) 

About the Land Cover of Canada datasets

CCRS produced 2010 and 2015 Land Cover of Canada datasets as part of the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC) North American Land Change Monitoring System (NALCMS) in partnership with the United States and Mexico. The continental and national datasets will be refreshed every five years.

Natural Resources Canada and the Geographical Names Board of Canada are pleased to announce the release of Stories from the Land: Indigenous Place Names in Canada, an interactive map of a selection of places in Canada with names that have origins in multiple Indigenous languages.  The sample of names shows the history and evolution of Indigenous place naming in Canada.

Explore the data!
You can access Stories from the Land: Indigenous Place Names in Canada data and documentation from the Open Government Portal.  WMS, Web Application and pre-packaged FGDB are available.

May 14, 2019

Larger image

Text version

View of the geographic extent of new buildings in New Brunswick superimposed on a satellite imagery

Natural Resources Canada is pleased to announce the release of more than 200,000 new buildings in New Brunswick for the automatically extracted building product. The data layer now includes more than 1.1 million buildings. New buildings data will be made available as new LiDAR data is acquired in Canada.

Explore the data!

You can access Automatically Extracted Buildings data and documentation from the Open Government Portal. WMS, Web Application and prepackaged FGDB and Shapefiles are available.

April 1, 2019

Physiographic Regions of Canada are now available as an interactive map.

Canada’s landmass is very diversified and comprises several distinctive areas, called physiographic regions, each of which has its own topography and geology. Physiographic regions are large areas that share similar relief and landforms shaped by common geomorphic processes and geological history. Physiographic regions are often used to describe Canada’s geography to show regional differences in climate, vegetation, population and the economy.

This map shows the location of seven physiographic regions, twenty-one sub-regions and their divisions with accompanying descriptive images and text.

Visit the Physiographic Regions Interactive Map to learn more.