Geospatial Data

A key source of geographic information the Atlas provides a selection of interactive and historical maps and geographical data available for reference or downloading

he File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is used to distribute geospatial data via its website. Below an exhaustive list of collections that allows to access the FTP site directly. In the FAQ section, the question Is it possible to access files with an FTP client (for example Filezilla, BulletProof FTP, etc.)? will help you for the massive download. Some digital files are large, often tens of megabytes in size. Plan to download during off-peak hours. It should be noted that the geospatial data have a wide variety of sources, scales, resolutions, projections, spectral resolutions and formats. Documentation is available for most products and is located with the product. In some cases it may be in a separate "doc" subfolder.

CanVec is a digital cartographic reference product produced by Natural Resources Canada. It originates from the best available geospatial data sources covering Canadian territory, offers quality topographic information in vector format complying with international geomatics standards

The National Hydro Network (NHN) focuses on providing a quality geometric description and a set of basic attributes describing Canada's inland surface waters. It provides geospatial digital data compliant with the NHN Standard such as lakes, reservoirs, watercourses (rivers and streams), canals, islands, drainage linear network, toponyms or geographical names, constructions and obstacles related to surface waters, etc. The best available federal and provincial data are used for its production, which is done jointly by the federal and interested provincial and territorial partners. The NHN is created from existing data at the 1:50 000 scale or better. The NHN data have a great potential for analysis, cartographic representation and display and will serve as base data in many applications. The NHN Work Unit Limits were created based on Water Survey of Canada Sub-Sub-Drainage Area.

The product High Resolution Digital Elevation Model (HRDEM) is part of the CanElevation Series created in support to the National Elevation Strategy implemented by NRCan. It includes a Digital Terrain Model (DTM), a Digital Surface Model (DSM) and other derived data. For DTM datasets, derived data available are slope, aspect, shaded relief, color relief and color shaded relief maps and for DSM datasets, derived data available are shaded relief, color relief and color shaded relief maps.

The datasets with geospatial representation of parcel and boundary information, suitable for Geographic Information Systems (GIS), are provided in separate products to meet different user requirements. It is important to understand and accept that these datasets are not to be used for defining boundaries. Administrative decisions should be based on legal documents and legal survey plans.

THIS IS A VERY INFORMATION RICH WEBPAGE. TAKE THE TIME TO CAREFULLY READ THE CONTENT.

This collection is a legacy product that is no longer supported. It may not meet current government standards. The Canadian Digital Elevation Model (CDEM) is part of Natural Resources Canada's altimetry system designed to better meet the users' needs for elevation data and products. The CDEM stems from the existing Canadian Digital Elevation Data (CDED). In these data, elevations can be either ground or reflective surface elevations. A CDEM mosaic can be obtained for a pre-defined or user-defined extent. The coverage and resolution of a mosaic varies according to latitude and to the extent of the requested area. Derived products such as slope, shaded relief and colour shaded relief maps can also be generated on demand by using the Geospatial-Data Extraction tool. Data can then be saved in many formats. The pre-packaged GeoTiff datasets are based on the National Topographic System of Canada (NTS) at the 1:250 000 scale; the NTS index file is available in the Resources section in many formats.

Generalized geology of the world: bedrock domains and major faults in GIS format: a small-scale world geology map with an extended geological attribute database.

Clicking on the link initiates an automatic download of the dataset as a zip file.