Date modified: 2024-08-09
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GeoBase
High quality foundational geospatial layers for Canada: Collected once, used many times; available without restrictions, under an open data licence.
117,000 square kilometers added to the GeoAI Data Series!
Explore data depicting roads, forested areas, hydrography and building footprints extracted from aerial photography provided by the Province of New Brunswick. With this latest update, the GeoAI Data Series now covers 170,000 square kilometers across Canada.
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Learn About GeoBase
What is the GeoBase Initiative?
The GeoBase initiative provides access to consistent, national scale geospatial foundational data for Canada’s land, water, and infrastructure. Foundational geospatial data, when layered or combined with other data, including scientific, socio-economic, or business information, provides location reference and essential geographic context, enabling richer analysis and better-informed decision- making, by governments, private sector companies and individual citizens.
The GeoBase initiative is founded upon federal, provincial, and territorial collaboration. In October 2001, the Canadian Council on Geomatics (CCOG), a partnership of federal, provincial, and territorial government mapping organizations, launched the GeoBase initiative, and created the GeoBase Steering Committee to guide its development. This initiative was the beginning of a new era of cooperation between various federal, provincial, and territorial stakeholders that is still ongoing today.
GeoBase was launched in November 2003 with free and open access to six layers of geospatial data under a common data licence without cost or restrictions on its subsequent use. In the decades since, GeoBase datasets have been downloaded millions of times, new data layers have been added, and national foundational data standards have been defined and adopted by the CCOG.
Natural Resources Canada (NRCan), the CCOG and the GeoBase Steering Committee continuously seek to improve GeoBase data and are keenly aware of the need to evolve the data offerings to meet the changing needs of Canadian geospatial data users.
GeoBase Data Principles
- GeoBase data is available at no cost.
- GeoBase data is available under Canada’s Open Government Licence – Canada.
- GeoBase has no restrictions on its subsequent use, as per the Open Government Licence – Canada.
- Where possible, GeoBase data provides national data coverage.
- GeoBase data is collected once and used by many.
- GeoBase data is collected and maintained by trusted sources.
- GeoBase complies with geospatial standards promoted by the Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure.
Through GEO.ca users can access the entire GeoBase data collection!
Explore GeoBase Gallery
All Data
We have found 12 records.
Aboriginal Lands
The Aboriginal Lands of Canada Legislative Boundaries web service includes legislative boundaries of Indian Reserves, Land Claim Settlement Lands (lands created under Comprehensive Land Claims Process that do not or will not have Indian Reserve status under the Indian Act) and Indian Lands.
Administrative Boundaries
The administrative features of the CanVec series include geopolitical regions (international, territorial and provincial) and populated place names.
Automatically Extracted Buildings
“Automatically Extracted Buildings” is a raw digital product in vector format created by NRCan.
It consists of a single topographical feature class that delineates polygonal building footprints automatically extracted from airborne Lidar data, high-resolution optical imagery or other sources
Canadian Hydrospatial Network
The Canadian Hydrospatial Network (CHN) is an analysis-ready geospatial network of features that help enable the modelling of surface water flow in Canada.
Canadian Digital Elevation Model
The Canadian Digital Elevation Model (CDEM) is part of Natural Resources Canada's altimetry system designed to better meet the users' needs for elevation data and products.
Federal Electoral Districts
Canada is divided into 338 electoral districts. A representative or member of Parliament is elected for each electoral district.
High Resolution Digital Elevation Model
The High Resolution Digital Elevation Model (HRDEM) product is derived from airborne LiDAR data (mainly in the south) and satellite images in the north. The complete coverage of the Canadian territory is gradually being established. It includes a Digital Terrain Model (DTM), a Digital Surface Model (DSM) and other derived data. For DTM datasets, derived data available are slope, aspect, shaded relief, color relief and color shaded relief maps and for DSM datasets, derived data available are shaded relief, color relief and color shaded relief maps.
Land Cover of Canada
Collection of Land Cover products for Canada as produced by Natural Resources Canada using Landsat satellite imagery. This collection of cartographic products offers classified Land Cover of Canada at a 30 metre scale, updated on a 5 year basis.
National Hydro Network (NHN)
The National Hydro Network (NHN) focuses on providing a quality geometric description and a set of basic attributes describing Canada's inland surface waters.
National Road Network
The NRN product is distributed in the form of thirteen provincial or territorial datasets and consists of two linear entities (Road Segment and Ferry Connection Segment) and three punctual entities (Junction, Blocked Passage, Toll Point) with which is associated a series of descriptive attributes such as, among others.
National Railway Network
The National Rail Network (NRWN) is a geometric and attributive description of the Canadian rail network.
The NRWN product consists of the features classes: Track Segment, Railway Crossing, Railway Station, Marker Post, Junction and Railway Structure.
