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Ecostratification

Currently the terrestrial and marine ecostratification hierarchies are widely accepted boundaries for compiling and analyzing Canadian environmental data (forestry, agriculture, climate, and biodiversity). The terrestrial ecostratification framework is a fully nested set of boundaries at increasing resolution, and includes ecozones, ecoprovinces, ecoregions, ecodistricts, and soil landscapes. This framework, completed in 1995, was developed in a cooperative project that involved over one hundred federal and provincial agencies and private sector stakeholders. The marine framework is still under development, but preliminary marine ecozone boundaries have been identified. Despite the wide acceptance of the terrestrial framework both by federal and provincial agencies, the boundaries were developed on an outdated paper base, and do not line up properly with majority of other datasets available at the scale of 1:1M.

In the last few years, VMAP level 0 (formerly DCW) has become the defacto standard used by almost all agencies in Canada to map features at a scale of 1:1M. This has caused problems when trying to use data from other agencies to characterize the various units in the ecostratification hierarchy, and has lead to problems in data analysis and visualization.

This project will realign the terrestrial and marine ecostratification frameworks to match the VMAP level 0 base. This realignment will result in a dataset that is fully compatible with all other datasets in the National Atlas of Canada, and facilitate the use of the Ecological framework in conjunction with other Canadian and International datasets.

This project should be seen as an early and significant 'killer app' for GeoConnections. The dataset is extremely popular. It has been embedded in a number of federal and provincial pieces of legislation, and has found its way into numerous school curriculums. The standardization of this dataset with other data at the scale of 1:1M will be an early and frequently visible proof of the utility of a shared CGDI.


Primary Partner: Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada  Ottawa,  Ontario;

Partners: NRCan GeoAccess Division

Funding From GeoConnections: $25,000.00 ( 41.67 %)

Estimated Inception Date: January, 2000

Estimated Completion Date: March, 2002

Deliverables from this project benefitted the following provinces: All provinces