Canada's Intact Forest Landscapes - 2010

An intact forest landscape is defined by Global Forest Watch Canada as a contiguous mosaic of naturally occurring ecosystems, including forest, bog, water, tundra, and rock outcrops, that is within a forest ecozone, and that is essentially undisturbed by significant human influence visible on Landsat satellite images. Intact forest landscape fragments are the best remaining pieces of our once-intact forest landscapes and they are therefore critical to the restoration of ecosystem functioning in areas affected by human development.

By mapping the remaining intact forest landscapes within Canada's forest ecozones, we aim provide better information for balancing industry needs and values with the need for recognition of non-market values, many of which are associated with relatively undisturbed forests. Mapping forest fragments provides a baseline from which future assessments of changes to Canada's remaining forest fragments can be made and from which further analysis can be performed to assist forest conservation planning and decision-making.

Intact forest landscape fragments were mapped by excluding the following types of disturbances and associated buffer exclusion zone from potential intact forest landscapes:

1. Settlements (500m exclusion zone);
2. Infrastructure used for communication between settlements and industrial sites; or for industrial exploitation of natural resources (including roads, railways, navigable waterways, pipelines, trunk power transmission lines and other linear disturbances) (1000m exlusion zone for all major roads/highways and 500m exclusion zones for all other linear disturbances);
3. Agricultural lands (500m exclusion zone);
4. Territories disturbed by economic activities during the last 30-70 years (logging, major reservoirs, mining operation sites, abandoned agricultural lands, etc.) (500m exclusion zone);
5. Artificially restored forests, or tree plantations, if their existence can be detected on Landsat satellite imagery (500m exclusion zone);

In addition to the disturbances listed above, large waterbodies (>400,000 ha) and waterbodies which represented more than half of a remaining intact forest landscape fragment were also eliminated from the dataset.

It should be noted that some human impacts are invisible from space, such as small forest roads and paths. Other smaller-scale impacts (including some selective logging) that occurred more than 30-70 years ago often become invisible on satellite imagery and indistinguishable from the natural dynamics of the forest. The maps of Canada's intact forests in Section 2 are based primarily on the visual interpretation of 1988-2002 Landsat images, and some imagery from the 2003-2006 period. Therefore, only more recent human impacts are recorded, which means that there is some overestimation of intact forest landscape areas despite the buffer exclusion zones applied to the disturbance layers that were used to create the intact forest landscape data.