Canada's National Forest Inventory (NFI) 2006

Canada's National Forest Inventory (NFI) sampling program is designed to support reporting on forests at the national scale. On the other hand, continuous maps of forest attributes are required to support strategic analyses of regional policy and management issues. We have therefore produced maps covering 4.03 × 106 km2 of inventoried forest area for the 2001 base year using standardised observations from the NFI photo plots (PP) as reference data. We used the k nearest neighbours (kNN) method with 26 geospatial data layers including MODIS spectral data and climatic and topographic variables to produce maps of 127 forest attributes at a 250 × 250 m resolution. The stand-level attributes include land cover, structure, and tree species relative abundance. In this article, we report only on total live aboveground tree biomass, with all other attributes covered in the supplementary data (http://nrcresearchpress.com/doi/suppl/10.1139/cjfr-2013-0401). In general, deviations in predicted pixel-level values from those in a PP validation set are greater in mountainous regions and in areas with either low biomass or sparse PP sampling. Predicted pixel-level values are overestimated at small observed values and underestimated at large ones. Accuracy measures are improved through the spatial aggregation of pixels to 1 km2 and beyond. Overall, these new products provide unique baseline information for strategic-level analyses of forests (https://nfi.nfis.org)

Related Products (16):

• Poplars, Aspens and Cottonwoods (Genus Populus) in Canada 2006

• Birches (Genus Betula) in Canada 2006

• Treed land in Canada 2006

• Merchantable forest volume in Canada 2006

• Needle-leaved species in Canada 2006

• Forest height in Canada 2006

• Total live above-ground biomass in Canada 2006

• Total forest volume in Canada 2006

• Spruces (Genus Picea) in Canada 2006

• Tree Crown Closure in Canada 2006

• Forest Composition across Canada 2006

• True Firs (Genus Abies) in Canada 2006

• Hemlocks (Genus Tsuga) in Canada 2006

• Broad-leaved species in Canada 2006

• Maples (Genus Acer) in Canada 2006

• Cedars (Genus Thuja) in Canada 2006