| The Canada Land Inventory
is a comprehensive multi-disciplinary land inventory of rural Canada,
covering over 2.5 million square kilometers of land and water . Land capability
for agriculture,
forestry, wildlife,
recreation, wildlife
( ungulates and waterfowl)
was mapped. Over 1000 mapsheets at the 1:250,000 scale are available on
this site for on-line map making and download of desktop publishing, or
GIS formats |
| The Canada
Council on Rural Development in a report on land use, acclaimed the
The Canada Land Inventory (CLI) as the most significant and productive
federal influence on rural land use in Canada. |
| In the past access and use
of CLI data was restricted to government agencies, consultants and academics
and interest groups with significant GIS computer capabilities. Now the
WWW and on-line mapping and analysis, combined with the easily understood
rating system, make the CLI a powerful tool for public involvement in
the sustainable development
of regions and rural communities |
| The CLI and the
Next Millennium: The CLI remains an important digital data base and
strategic information source particularly suitable for the use through
the information highway. The ecosystem based land classification approach
ensures that information is “timeless”. The only riders are urban development,
reservoirs, and subtle impacts of climate change |
| Many significant spin
offs resulted from the Canada land Inventory, including the first
operational geographic information system(GIS) in the world, and ecological
land classification and zoning. |
| The Government of Canada developed the Canada Land Inventory
(CLI) under the auspices of the Department of Regional and Economic Expansion (1963-1971) and the Department
of the Environment (renamed Environment Canada), (1971- 1994). The program was officially discontinued in
1994. The process to transfer the data and intellectual property to the National Archives of Canada started
in 1995. Since 1995 several Canadian federal departments have been instrumental in extracting the data from
the old tapes to modern formats and media, including: National Archives of Canada, Agriculture and Agri-Food
Canada, Statistics Canada, and Natural Resources Canada.
|
| The current initiative by Natural Resources Canada has and
continues to develop files in a variety of formats and projections for free distribution on the public
Internet site known as GeoGratis (http://geogratis.cgdi.gc.ca) with the intellectual property held by
the National Archives of Canada.
|
Updated 11 January 2000
|
