Datasets

Federal, provincial, municipal governments, academic institutions, and non-government organizations produce, maintain, and distribute several urban forest and urban environment-related datasets covering all or part of Canada. Many of these available datasets are helpful for urban forestry practitioners as they are standardized and have long-term update plans, ensuring their availability in the future. Most of these datasets are available online, publicly accessible, or available through data-sharing agreements. National and provincial data are listed below, as well as some individual national datasets made available by non-governmental organizations. Federal and provincial datasets generally contain remote sensing and spatial data, geological and soil data, census data, and other large-scale data types. 

Municipal datasets often include local landcover data, orthoimagery, and city-level spatial data. Many municipalities and cities across Canada develop and maintain open data portals specific to their geographic area. Some of these are: In Alberta, Edmonton, Calgary, Medicine Hat, Red Deer, and Grande Prairie. In British Columbia, the open data includes Vancouver, Kamloops, Langley, Nanaimo, North Vancouver, Prince George, Surrey, and the Regional District of North Okanagan. For Manitoba, there is open data for Winnipeg. In New Brunswick, for Fredericton. Ontario’s open data municipalities include London, Ottawa, Toronto, Windsor, Niagara Falls, Mississauga, Burlington, York Region, Peel Region, Niagara Region, Guelph, Hamilton, City of Waterloo, and Waterloo Region. In Quebec, the cities are Montreal, Ville de Québec/Quebec City, and Sherbrooke. In Saskatchewan, open data is available for Regina and Saskatoon, New Brunswick for Fredericton, and Prince Edward Island for Charlottetown. 

For further information about any other municipality, visit the municipal site to determine if an open data portal is maintained by the appropriate governing authority.