Using Open Source to analyze Canada's National Forest Inventory

Presentation | Presented

  • Chris West, Canadian Forest Service, Natural Resources Canada
  • Brian Low, Canadian Forest Service, Natural Resources Canada

Canada’s new National Forest Inventory (NFI) is designed to asses and monitor the extent, state and sustainable development of Canada’s. Canada’s National Forest Information System (NFIS Canada) project office has developed a suite of applications based on Open Source technologies to analyze all spatial information for required to report on the NFI.

The NFI design elements are based on a network of sampling points across Canada with a stratification of the sampling points by terrestrial ecozones with varying sampling intensity amount the strata. Estimation of area and other attributes from remote-sensing through 2km by 2km photo plots are required. Layers of information for each photo plot include: land cover, land user, land ownership and protection status. Also included are layers of information collected by satellite imagery and classified for land cover. All these layers of information are rasterized to a 5 meter by 5 meter grid of 160,000 cells for each photo plot. These cells are used for analysis and for future change detection applications.

The NFIS project office has developed a suite of applications utilizing geospatial open source technologies to aid in the processing of these 180,000+ photo plot layers. These technologies include that of: UMN Mapserver, Proj4, GDAL, OGR, Geotools, and PostGIS.

Supporting Files