GIS & Spatial Data: Thematic Data

This guide is an excellent source for locating GIS data by theme (e.g., biodiversity, crime, environment, pollution, etc.).

The Canada Land Inventory is a comprehensive multi-disciplinary land inventory of rural Canada which maps land capability for agriculture, forestry, recreation and wildlife (ungulates and waterfowl). Over 1000 map sheets at a scale of 1:250,000 are available to download for use with GIS software.
File type: Shapefile

A National Forest Inventory is compiled about every five years by aggregating provincial management inventories. Provincial data is summarized to 48,000 aggregation units (consistent with provincial mapsheets), and stored in a relational database management system and a GIS (CanFI).
File type: Various

Includes access to the National Soils Database (NSDB), Soil Interpretations data, Soil Survey Reports and all related documentation.
File type: Various

This respository is a collection of Earth Sciences Sector geoscience databases that is managed and accessed by a series of Information Services (GDRIS). The aim of the GDR is to standardize corporate databases and make them interoperable in order to increase the discovery, access and use of the geoscience information that the Sector has been mandated to collect and maintain.

Health regions are defined by the provinces and represent administrative areas or regions of interest to health authorities. This product contains correspondence files (linking health regions to latest Census geographic codes) and digital boundary files. (Use the "HTML" links for best access).

This site offers hourly, daily, monthly and normal data for meteorological stations across Canada. The variables included in the database for each station depend on the time step chosen but may include min/max/mean temperature, precipitation, wind speed/direction, dew point, relative humidity, visibility, atmospheric pressure and heat/cool degree days.

The Polar Data Catalogue is a database of metadata and data that describes, indexes and provides access to diverse data sets generated by Arctic and Antarctic researchers. The records follow Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) standard format to provide metadata exchange with other data centres. The records cover a wide range of disciplines from natural sciences and policy, to health and social sciences. This geospatial search tool is available to the public and researchers alike and allows searching data using a mapping interface or other parameters.

The Wind Energy Atlas web site aims at developing new meteorological tools to be used by Canada's wind energy industry. It offers the possibility to browse through and download the results of the numerical simulations that were run on all of Canada in order to determine its wind energy potential.