Historical forest airborne imagery corresponds to an annual collection of orthophotographs, acquired by aerial overview in order to meet the needs of the ecoforest inventory of southern Quebec (IEQM) and the global forest planning cycle (operational forest planning, forest planning, forest monitoring and forest activity controls). These images serve, among other things, to feed the process of photo-interpretation and production of the ecoforest map essential for sustainable forest management, as well as the overall forest planning cycle.
Historical orthophotographs are assembled into mosaics. Each mosaic groups together the images from an acquisition project that have the same shooting year, the same spatial resolution and the same spectral bands. Mosaics have been produced since 2002 for ecoforest inventory and since 2004 for planning, monitoring and control images. The spatial resolution is generally 20, 21 or 30 cm (with a few exceptions of 50 and 63 cm) for the images that make up the mosaics of the ecoforest inventory, while it is much more variable for the planning, monitoring and control images (from 4 to 150 cm). Spectral bands and colors of images vary: black and white (panchromatic [PAN]), infrared (IRP), or natural (red, green, and blue colors [RGB]).
The images used to produce the mosaics are spread over almost all of Quebec, south of the 52nd parallel. They are acquired in a cycle of about 10 years for the IEQM and annually for the needs of the global forest planning cycle. Note that imagery acquired through partnerships has been excluded due to their more restrictive broadcast license.
The orthophotography mosaics of the ecoforest inventory are available for download in three formats depending on the territory (JPEG 2000, ECW and GeoTIFF) and are also accessible for visualization using a web mapping service (WMTS). Note that the orthophotography mosaics for planning, monitoring and controls are only available for viewing and not for download.
This third party metadata element was translated using an automated translation tool (Amazon Translate).