Monthly Fraction of Vegetation Cover of Canada from Medium Resolution Satellite Imagery

FCOVER corresponds to the amount of the ground surface that is covered by vegetation, including the understory, when viewed vertically (from nadir). FCOVER is an indicator of the spatial extent of vegetation independent of land cover class. It is a dimensionless quantity that varies from 0 to 1, and as an intrinsic property of the canopy, is not dependent on satellite observation conditions. This product consists of a national scale coverage (Canada) of monthly maps of FCOVER indicator during a growing season (May-June-July-August-September) at 20m resolution.

References:

L. Brown, R. Fernandes, N. Djamai, C. Meier, N. Gobron, H. Morris, C. Canisius, G. Bai, C. Lerebourg, C. Lanconelli, M. Clerici, J. Dash. Validation of baseline and modified Sentinel-2 Level 2 Prototype Processor leaf area index retrievals over the United States IISPRS J. Photogramm. Remote Sens., 175 (2021), pp. 71-87, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isprsjprs.2021.02.020. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0924271621000617

Richard Fernandes, Luke Brown, Francis Canisius, Jadu Dash, Liming He, Gang Hong, Lucy Huang, Nhu Quynh Le, Camryn MacDougall, Courtney Meier, Patrick Osei Darko, Hemit Shah, Lynsay Spafford, Lixin Sun, 2023.

Validation of Simplified Level 2 Prototype Processor Sentinel-2 fraction of canopy cover, fraction of absorbed photosynthetically active radiation and leaf area index products over North American forests,

Remote Sensing of Environment, Volume 293, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2023.113600.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0034425723001517

Data and Resources

Additional Info

Field Value
Last Updated January 16, 2026, 20:41 (UTC)
Created January 16, 2026, 20:41 (UTC)
contains_pii non
crisis_categories Canicules
criticality_level Faible
data_formats GeoTIF; HTML; WCS; WMS
fair_openness Level 2 - Machine-readable
geographic_scope Canada
sensitivity_level Faible
source_inventaire Inventaire_W
source_url https://open.canada.ca/data/en/dataset/d7b177e0-274a-4be9-b69a-2030faf83c78
subject form_descriptors
update_frequency as_needed
year_most_recent 2024-11-12 13:50:37.522000
year_start 2024-01-16 20:20:31.663000