What's New

Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) is pleased to announce the release of a new product called LiDAR Point Clouds. The product is a part of the CanElevation Series created to support the National Elevation Data Strategy led by NRCan and distributed under the Open Government License.

With scattered publication records stretching back to 1696, it has been labour intensive to search publications to determine historical flood events for a specific region – until now. With over 1400 flood events documented in over 7000 locations, the NRCan Historical Flood Events data layer provides an accessible way to view the who, what, when, and where of historical flood events in Canada.

Over 186,000 km² of LiDAR-derived elevation data are released on Open Maps to complement the HRDEM and HRDEM Mosaic products. In terms of area covered, this is the largest release of LiDAR-derived data to date by NRCan!

Check out the new World Map. The World is a general reference political map focused on the names and international boundaries of sovereign and non-sovereign countries. The information is portrayed using the Winkel II projection at a scale of 1:29 000 000. For more information, please visit The World – Open Government.

November 9, 2021

Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) is pleased to announce the release of a range of new LiDAR-derived data on Open Maps – with data from numerous government organizations across the country.

More than 100,000 km2 of new High Resolution Digital Elevation Models (HRDEM) have been added to the HRDEM and HRDEM Mosaic products. New data are located in the provinces of British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, Prince Edward Island, and the Northwest Territories. The total coverage of LiDAR-derived HRDEM and HRDEM Mosaic data is now nearly 600,000 km2 and covers 84 of the 100 largest Canadian cities!

In addition, a new visualization tool for the HRDEM Mosaic product is now available and provides quick and easy access to the HRDEM Mosaic and all of its derived products. A new and efficient way to view the most accurate elevation data in the country!

For more information on the HRDEM product, consult the product specifications or the download procedure. The HRDEM Mosaic product specifications are available here.

June 22, 2021

Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) is pleased to announce the release of over 100,000 km2 of new data in the High-Resolution Digital Elevation Model (HRDEM) and HRDEM Mosaic. The total area of high-resolution elevation data derived from LiDAR is now nearly 500,000 km². The data is distributed across eight provinces: British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador (see map below).

With the addition of this data, 61 of Canada's 100 largest cities are covered by the HRDEM product and the HRDEM Mosaic. This includes the entire area of both the National Capital Region and the Ottawa River, areas that are highly vulnerable to flooding. The 10,000 km2 project was carried out in collaboration with the City of Ottawa, the City of Gatineau, NRCan, the National Capital Commission (NCC) and the Province of Ontario and supported by the Emergency Management Strategy for Canada.

This highly detailed 3D information provides essential foundational geospatial data for many government projects and priorities, such as flood mapping, forest inventories, climate change monitoring and urban management.

April 6^th, 2021

Summary : 45 NHN-CL3 watersheds are published.

With the publication of these new watersheds, over 90% of watersheds covering Canada allow for better analysis of hydrological networks.

Details:

• All 44 of Nova Scotia’s watersheds have been updated with provincial data,
• 1 Canada/USA bi-national watersheds was regenerated.

We are in the process of restructuring the NHN model. This is the last release of the NHN in its current form.

For more information on the National Hydro Network, please visit the GeEAU website.

For more information about the Hydrographic Network Quality, please refer to the Completeness Level.

February 8, 2021

Natural Resources Canada's Automatically Extracted Building product now includes more than 2 million buildings.

The footprint, elevation and height of buildings are automatically extracted from LiDAR data collected from the National Elevation Data Strategy developed in collaboration with various partners.

Recent additions include more than 300,000 buildings in the St. Lawrence Valley between Montreal and Trois-Rivières as well as more than 200,000 additional buildings across Canada.

Explore the data!

You can access Automatically Extracted Buildings data and documentation from the Open Government Portal. The data is available free of charge under the Open Government Licence of Canada either by download or through a Web Map Service.

December 10, 2020

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Cube-shaped illustration of multiple elevation products offered through the HRDEM mosaic product.

Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) is pleased to announce the release of the High-Resolution Digital Elevation Model Mosaic (HRDEM Mosaic) product. This new HRDEM Mosaic product is part of the CanElevation Series created to support the National Elevation Data Strategy implemented by NRCan.

The HRDEM Mosaic product was developed for users to visualize and interact with the data produced under the strategy. Unlike the HRDEM product in the same series, where data is separated and distributed by each acquisition project, the mosaic is created to provide a single, continuous representation of data from the Strategy. The most recent datasets for a given area are used to generate the mosaic.

The coverage of the HRDEM Mosaic product will gradually increase as new HRDEM data becomes available. Here is an overview of various derived products generated "on the fly" and offered through the new HRDEM Mosaic product.

1- Hillshade of the Digital Surface Model 2- Hillshade of the Digital Terrain Model
3- Slope map 4- Aspect map

Natural Resources Canada wishes to inform you that as of April 1, 2020, certain geospatial products will no longer be corrected or maintained. They may not meet current government standards. However, they will still be available to the public.

Other products that have reached the end of their life-cycle will either be replaced or removed.

December 20, 2019

The CanVec product includes the following modifications:

• Administrative boundaries at 1 :50 000 and 1 :250 000 scales are not anymore included in the CanVec product.
• The territorial sea limits and the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) limits were modified to correspond to those of Fisheries and Oceans Canada.
• CanVec is now available in OGC GeoPackage.
• The GML format is not available anymore for the CanVec product.
• Adding of attributes display_priority for the toponymic entity classes.
• Adding of attributes geom_db for the toponymic entity classes.

Please see the CanVec Release notes for more details.

Access CanVec data as pre-packaged files through the FTP site, or by defining a custom area for downloading through the Geospatial Data Extraction tool.