Environmental Thematic Maps and Graphics:
Forest fire and harvesting

The title of this map is “Forest fire and harvesting.” This map provides a visual representation of forest fire and harvesting disturbance in Canada over several decades.

On the page, there is one large map of Canada, a legend to the upper right and a scale bar below. The map depicts ecoprovinces with a thin black boundary line labeled with their ecoprovince codes. Fine black dashed lines show provincial and territorial boundaries. Below the map, ecoprovince codes and their corresponding names are listed for reference.

The map shows the area affected by disturbance types by colour. The legend contains two categories: red displays forest fire disturbance between 1986 and 2019 and green displays harvested forest between 1986 and 2015.

The map shows that forest harvesting is the more common type of disturbance in southern Canada and appears particularly prevalent in Quebec, British Columbia and New Brunswick. Large expanses of the boreal forest stretching from the Yukon to Northern Quebec were affected by forest fires.

Notes: Harvest data are identified by 30 m Landsat remote sensing. Fire data are taken from the National Burned Area Composite, part of the Fire Monitoring, Accounting and Reporting System, based on the integration of data from fine and coarse resolution satellite data from Natural Resources Canada and Provincial, Territorial and Parks Canada Agencies. These data differ from the harvesting and burned area totals reported in the National Forestry Database, which are based on different methodologies.

Sources:
Natural Resources Canada, Canadian Forest Service, 2020, National Burned Area Composite (NBAC), http://cwfis.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/datamart (accessed October 26, 2020);
Guindon, L., et al., 2017, Canada Landsat Disturbance (CanLaD): a Canada-wide Landsat-based 30-m resolution product of fire and harvest detection and attribution since 1984, https://doi.org/10.23687/add1346b-f632-4eb9-a83d-a662b38655ad (accessed July 20, 2020);
Data files downloaded from https://opendata.nfis.org/mapserver/nfis-change_eng.html (accessed July 20, 2020).