Seamounts have been identified as Ecologically or Biologically Significant Areas (EBSAs) due to their unique oceanography and ecology; they frequently serve as sites for fisheries and as habitat for a number of species of conservation concern. A mix of isolated seamounts and seamount complexes are distributed throughout Canada’s Pacific offshore waters, although only a subset of these are named. We used several pre-existing spatial databases and predictive models to map all named seamounts within Canada’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), all named seamounts fished by Canada in international waters, and any predicted (modelled) unnamed seamounts in the EEZ. These data are intended to inform marine planning initiatives in BC by providing collaborative, peer-reviewed scientific data at scales relevant to a BC coast-wide analysis.

Ocean captured at 1:1,000,000 scale Digital Chart of the World data for the Yukon and surrounding area. Distributed from GeoYukon by the Government of Yukon. Discover more digital map data and interactive maps from Yukon's digital map data collection. For more information: geomatics.help@yukon.ca

This map is used in the storymap/activity: Canada's Atlantic Ocean & Fisheries

Ocean captured at 1:1,000,000 scale Digital Chart of the World data for the Yukon and surrounding area. Distributed from GeoYukon by the Government of Yukon. Discover more digital map data and interactive maps from Yukon's digital map data collection. For more information: geomatics.help@yukon.ca

Ecologically and Biologically Significant Areas (EBSAs) are areas within Canada's oceans that have been identified through formal scientific assessments as having special biological or ecological significance when compared with the surrounding marine ecosystem. Failure to define an area as an EBSA does not mean that it is unimportant ecologically. All areas serve ecological functions to some extent and require sustainable management. Rather, areas identified as EBSAs should be viewed as the most important areas where, with existing knowledge, regulators and marine users should be particularly risk averse to ensure ecosystems remain healthy and productive. Why are EBSAs identified? EBSA information is used to inform marine planning, including environmental assessment and the siting of marine-based activities, by: - Informing and guiding project-specific or regional environmental assessments; - Informing and guiding industries and regulators in their planning and operations, for example: EBSAs have been acknowledged and referred to (often as "Special Areas" or "Potentially Sensitive Areas") in oil and gas related assessments; - EBSA information has been provided to proponents of submarine cable projects to be used for route planning purposes; - Informing and guiding Integrated Oceans Management (IOM) process within five Large Ocean Management Areas (LOMAs) and twelve marine bioregions; - Serving as a basis for the identification of Areas of Interest (AOIs) and of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) (individually and in the context of planning bioregional networks of MPAs). How are EBSAs identified? The process used to identify EBSAs is generally comprised of two phases. The first phase involves compiling scientific data and knowledge of a marine area's ecosystems - notably fish species, marine mammals, sea birds, marine flora, marine productivity, physical and chemical conditions and geology. "Knowledge" includes experiential knowledge of long-time uses of the areas. In some cases (e.g., in the Arctic), substantial efforts are taken to collect traditional knowledge on ecosystems and environmental conditions from community members, fish harvests, hunters and individuals whose knowledge of the study area complement often helps fill scientific data gaps. In the second phase, the available information for a marine area (e.g. a bioregion) is assessed against five nationally-established science-based criteria including: - Uniqueness: How distinct is the ecosystem of an area compared to surrounding ones? - Aggregation: Whether or not species populate or convene to the study area? - Fitness consequence: How critical the area is to the life history of the species that use it (e.g. is it a spawning or feeding ground)? - Naturalness: How pristine or disturbed by human activities is the study area? - Resilience: What is the ability of the ecosystem to bounce back if it is disturbed? Progress to date and next steps EBSAs have been identified for large portions of Canada's Atlantic and Pacific Oceans as well as most of the Arctic oceans. EBSAs will continue to be identified in priority areas as resources become available to carry out the process. The boundaries or locations of existing EBSAs may be modified to reflect both new knowledge and changing environmental conditions.

Contained within the Atlas of Canada Poster Map Series, is a map depicting the 5 main watersheds in Canada. Building Canadian Water Connections initiative and the Canadian Wildlife Federation have collaborated to produce this map that promotes the importance of watersheds through education. Canada's five ocean watersheds are colour-coded on the map: Pacific Ocean, Arctic Ocean, Hudson Bay, Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico. Each of these five massive landscapes contains a hierarchy of watersheds. This map depicts 594 watersheds, most of which are connected and ultimately flow into an ocean.

These data were automated to provide an accurate high-resolution historical shoreline of Lake Erie, Fort Erie, Canada to Lackawanna, New York suitable as a geographic information system (GIS) data layer. These data are derived from shoreline maps that were produced by the NOAA National Ocean Service including its predecessor agencies which were based on an office interpretation of imagery an...

Marine protected areas (MPAs) are one among a number of spatial management tools, and are defined as areas that are established for the long-term, and managed through legal or other effective means, to achieve the long-term conservation of nature with associated ecosystem services and cultural values. Currently, Fisheries and Oceans Canada has a number of MPAs designated under the Oceans Act and Areas of Interest for new MPAs at various stages of progress towards designation. These areas are ecologically significant, with species and/or features that require special management consideration.  An Oceans Act MPA can be established for any of the six conservation purposes outlined in the Act: • The conservation and protection of commercial and non-commercial fishery resources, including marine mammals, and their habitats;  • The conservation and protection of endangered or threatened marine species, and their habitats;  • The conservation and protection of unique habitats;  • The conservation and protection of marine areas of high biodiversity or biological productivity; • The conservation and protection of any other marine resource or habitat as is necessary to fulfill the mandate of the Minister; and • The conservation and protection of marine areas for the purposes of maintaining ecological integrity

This dataset comprises a map of inland water bodies in Canada and neighboring regions, as described by Ghayourmanesh et al. (2024). The data are mapped using the Lambert Conformal Conic (LCC) geographic projection with a spatial resolution of 250 meters. The LCC projection is frequently used as a standard projection at the Canada Centre for Remote Sensing (CCRS) (Trishchenko et al., 2016, Trishchenko, 2019). Each pixel value represents a code describing either the probability of inland water presence or land/ocean(sea) mask

A watershed is an area that drains all precipitation received as a runoff or base flow (groundwater sources) into a particular river or set of rivers. The easiest way to describe the network of rivers and lakes on a small-scale map is to show the watersheds. In Canada, there is a detailed hierarchy of watersheds, ranging from the largest (drainage into oceans and their equivalents), down to the smallest ramification. Canada’s ocean watersheds are the Atlantic Ocean, Hudson Bay, Arctic Ocean, Pacific Ocean and Gulf of Mexico.

This dataset contains a variety of spatial data types describing the physical oceanographic and climatic setting of the Bering, Chukchi, and Beaufort Seas. Specifically, these data describe surface and subsurface currents, approximate freshwater discharge, terrestrial input of organic matter, monthly sea ice advance and retreat extents, and changes in annual and projected averages in sea water temperatures and in the concentrations of sea ice, benthic infaunal biomass, and in plankton, euphausiid, copepod communities. Staff at Audubon Alaska and Oceana used these data to create the maps displayed in 'Chapter 2: Physical Setting', in the 'Ecological Atlas of the Bering, Chukchi, and Beaufort Seas'. This dataset contains four zipped archives of spatial data and metadata and two summary files. The zip files are: 1. ArcticMarine2017_Public_Ch2PhysicalSetting.gdb.zip, compiled by Audubon Alaska staff and used to generate the maps in chapter 2 of the Ecological Atlas, 2. ArcticMarine2017_Public_Ch2_Addition.gdb.zip, compiled by Audubon Alaska staff with additional raster data used to generate the maps in chapter 2 of the Ecological Atlas, ch2_vector-4326, containing csv formatted vector data files along with metadata extracted from the geodatabase, and ch2_raster, containing geotiff formatted raster data and metadata used in the maps in the Atlas but not included in the geodatabase. The summary files are: 1. audubon_EABCBS_ch2_physical_setting_manifest.txt, listing all file path, size, and md5sum hash value for each file in each of the zip files, 2. audubon_EABCBS_ch2_physical_setting_README.txt, providing basic, human-readable metadata about the dataset, 3. audubon_EABCBS_ch2_physical_setting_data_sources.pdf, listing the data sources used for each map in chapter 6 of the atlas, and 4. audubon_EABCBS_data_sources_appendix.csv, listing the sources used for each spatial synthesis data product created by Audubon Alaska and then used to generate the maps in chapter 6, and listed in the data sources pdf. These files contain only the data used in the Atlas and deemed appropriate for public release. Certain data deemed sensitive were not included in these publicly available data archives.

This map shows the five major ocean drainage areas in Canada: Hudson Bay, Arctic Ocean, Atlantic Ocean, Pacific Ocean and Gulf of Mexico. An inset map shows the major dams with reservoir capacity larger than 1 billion cubic metres. Six of the 10 largest hydro-electric generating stations by capacity are located in the province of Quebec; whereas, the largest, Churchill Falls is in Newfoundland and Labrador. The other 3 are located in British Columbia.

A digital magnetic anomaly database and map for the North American continent is the result of a joint effort by the Geological Survey of Canada (GSC), U. S. Geological Survey (USGS), and Consejo de Recursos Minerales of Mexico (CRM). The database and map represent a substantial upgrade from the previous compilation of magnetic anomaly data for North America, now over a decade old.

Contained within the Atlas of Canada 8.5x11 series maps is a map which was created as a joint effort by The Atlas of Canada, The National Institute of Statistics, Geography and Informatics, Mexico and the National Atlas of the United States under the sponsorship of the commission for environmental cooperation. The map shows the major North American drainage basins, or wateresheds, which drain into the Atlantic Ocean, Hudson Bay, the Arctic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, the gulf of Mexico and teh Caribbean Sea. Each watershed is shown in its own colour, with subdivisions shown in tonal variations. Areas of internal drainage, which lack outlets to the sea, are shown in grey.

DESCRIPTION:

The Ocean Soundscape Atlas is an interactive online tool for viewing maps of the different components of ocean soundscapes: geophony (sounds of geophysical origin such as winds and waves), biophony (sounds emitted by animal species such as whales) and anthropophony (sounds from human activities such as maritime traffic).

This application makes it possible to browse, in 3D space and time, the interactions between acoustic components and the potential impacts on marine species, especially those at risk. It is used in particular to make vertical sections along user-defined trajectories as well as to extract statistics on predefined or user-defined areas of interest.

CONTEXT:

The Ocean Soundscape Atlas is the result of a long-term collaboration between the underwater acoustics research teams of the Maurice-Lamontagne Institute, Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) and the Institute of Marine Sciences (Ismer) within the “DFO Research Chair in Marine Acoustics Applied to Ecosystem and Marine Mammal Research at Ismer”. This initiative begins with pioneering work on maritime traffic noise (Simard et al. 2010), underwater ambient noise (Kinda et al. 2013), and the impact of shipping noise on marine mammals (Gervaise et al. 2012). It then continues with the development of a fully probabilistic approach to assess the impact of maritime traffic noise on marine ecosystems including modeling (Gervaise et al. 2015), in situ measurement of levels at the source. vessels according to ASA / ISO international standards (Simard et al. 2016), and acoustic impacts on ecosystems (Aulanier et al. 2016, 2017). This work results in a map production tool, called RAMDAM, that will serve as the foundation for the Ocean Soundscape Atlas. Between 2017 and 2021, the Atlas of Acoustic Oceanic Landscapes project is funded by the Canadian Fund for Innovation, the Government of Quebec and Fisheries and Ocean Canada as part of the "Cyberinfrastructure Initiative, First Challenge - Infrastructure of research data ”. The MERIDIAN project (Marine Environmental Research Infrastructure for Data Integration and Application Network), submitted by a pan-Canadian consortium of universities and industrial partners, has a mandate to assist the scientific community in marine sciences in order to develop innovative tools. using Compute Canada's cyberinfrastructure, with the objective of managing, discovering, accessing, visualizing and analyzing massive data in underwater acoustics; like the millions of maps of the Ocean Soundscape Atlas. This initiative benefited over the same period from a regional synergy in underwater acoustics, in particular thanks to its complementarity with the Oceans Protection Program - Marine Environment Quality, Fisheries and Oceans Canada and the participation of the Global Observatory of the Saint-Laurent at the forefront of oceanographic data management and diffusion in Canada.

REFERENCES:

Simard, Y., Lepage, R., & Gervaise, C. (2010). Anthropogenic sound exposure of marine mammals from seaways: Estimates for Lower St. Lawrence Seaway, eastern Canada. Applied Acoustics, 71(11), 1093-1098.

Gervaise, C., Simard, Y., Roy, N., Kinda, B., & Menard, N. (2012). Shipping noise in whale habitat: Characteristics, sources, budget, and impact on belugas in Saguenay–St. Lawrence Marine Park hub. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 132(1), 76-89.

Kinda, B, G., Simard, Y., Gervaise, C., Mars, J. I., & Fortier, L. (2013). Under-ice ambient noise in Eastern Beaufort Sea, Canadian Arctic, and its relation to environmental forcing. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 134(1), 77-87.

Gervaise, C., Aulanier, F., Simard, Y., & Roy, N. (2015). Mapping probability of shipping sound exposure level. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 137(6), EL429-EL435.

Aulanier, F., Simard, Y., Roy, N., Gervaise, C., & Bandet, M. (2016). Spatial-temporal exposure of blue whale habitats to shipping noise in St. Lawrence system. Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Science Advisory Secretatiat Research Document. 2016/090, vi + 26 p.

Simard, Y., Roy, N., Gervaise, C., & Giard, S. (2016). Analysis and modeling of 255 source levels of merchant ships from an acoustic observatory along St. Lawrence Seaway. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 140(3), 2002-2018.

Aulanier, F., Simard, Y., Roy, N., Bandet, M., and Gervaise, C. (2016). "Groundtruthed probabilistic shipping noise modeling and mapping: Application to blue whale habitat in the Gulf of St. Lawrence," Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics 27, 070006.

Aulanier, F., Simard, Y., Roy, N., Gervaise, C., & Bandet, M. (2017). Effects of shipping on marine acoustic habitats in Canadian Arctic estimated via probabilistic modeling and mapping. Marine Pollution Bulletin, 125(1-2), 115-131.

TERMS OF USE AND RESPONSABILITY:

This is a prototype display platform for products derived from underwater acoustic models and measurements. The data displayed are preliminary results produced for scientific research, incompletely validated by measurements and by peers. The interpretation of its maps therefore requires a critical judgment by an expert in underwater acoustic modeling and measurements. The use of the data displayed for impact study or scientific research is prohibited. The distribution and reproduction of screen displays without the agreement of those responsible for the Meridian Soundscape Atlas project is not authorized. The broadcasters reject any responsibility for the possible use of these visualizations for any purpose. Contains information licensed under the Open Government License - Canada.

The data layer (.shp) presented is the result of an unsupervised classification method for classifying seafloor habitat on German Bank (off South West Nova Scotia, Canada). This method involves separating environmental variables derived from multibeam bathymetry (Slope, Curvature) and backscatter (principal components: Q1, Q2, and Q3) into spatial units (i.e. pixels) and classifying the acoustically separated units into 5 habitat classes (Reef, Glacial Till, Silt, Silt with Bedforms, and Sand with Bedforms) using in situ data (imagery). Benthoscape classes (synonymous to landscape classifications in terrestrial ecology) describe the geomorphology and biology of the seafloor and are derived from elements of the seafloor that were acoustically distinguishable. Unsupervised classifications (acoustic classifications) optimized at 15 classes using Idrisi CLUSTER method (pixel based) Number representing the benthoscape classes (CLASS) derived from in situ imagery and video (See Brown et al., 2012, Figure 3, Table 1). Benthoscape classes (See Brown et al., 2012, Figure 3). Reference: Brown, C. J., Sameoto, J. A., & Smith, S. J. (2012). Multiple methods, maps, and management applications: Purpose made seafloor maps in support of ocean management. Journal of Sea Research, 72, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.seares.2012.04.009 Cite this data as: Brown, C. J., Sameoto, J. A., & Smith, S. J. Data of: Benthoscape Map of German Bank. Published: February 2021. Population Ecology Division, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Dartmouth, N.S. https://open.canada.ca/data/en/dataset/b7f81d4a-2cb6-4393-b35b-e536ec63e834

This feature layer depicts the watershed boundaries of Canada and provides a detailed look at drainage areas and water flow for the entire land mass of Canada.

This map service references the Water Survey of Canada (WSC) data. The WSC has a 3-level hierarchy of drainage areas established in 1927 for the purpose of managing hydrometric stations (recording water levels or rates of flow). They are: Major Drainage Areas, Sub Drainage Areas and Sub-sub Drainage Areas.

This map service includes all three drainage area boundaries as well as the highest order boundary, the ocean drainage area.

In 2021, the Canada Coast Guard (CCG) and Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) updated its administrative boundaries following the creation a new Arctic region.There are now 7 administrative regions in DFO (Pacific, Arctic, Ontario and Prairie, Quebec, Gulf, Maritimes, Newfoundland and Labrador). DFO and Coast Guard Arctic Regions developed these regions in partnership with the people they serve; this important decision will lead to stronger programs and services to better meet the unique needs of our Arctic communities.DFO and CCG operations and research cover Canada's land and waters to the international boundaries (EEZ) and are in no way limited to the boundaries drawn in the map.

The Flood Mapping Team within NRCan’s Canada Centre for Mapping and Earth Observation (CCMEO) has completed the digitization of these approximately 1400 historical flood events. By scraping publication records for flood event details, they created a publicly available data layer consisting of point data with attributes for flood location, years/seasons, and details. Sources are available for every point. The maps can be a starting point for understanding regional flood trends or for training machine learning models for predicting nation-wide flood risk.CCMEO’s Flood Mapping Team is advancing flood mapping practices in Canada by leading the Flood Hazard Identification and Mapping Program, compiling existing flood hazard data through the National Flood Hazard Data Layer, digitizing historical flood maps, publishing flood mapping guidelines, and researching innovative ways to advance flood mapping practices relating to geomatics. Overall, the modernization of flood mapping practices will help communities understand and manage their flood risk.The point groupings correspond to the locations that were affected by the same event. The inventory of past flooding has been compiled from various public sources and standardized into a common data model. Flooding events for which no location was included in the sources are positioned on the place name of the location affected by the flooding. The event positions do not indicate where the flooding occurred. It should be noted that no consultation was conducted with the various providers and stakeholders of historical flood data. Disparities in content between the various sources result in an inconsistent product. No warranty is given as to the accuracy or completeness of the information provided. The absence of information does not mean that no flooding has occurred.Additional Resources:Historical flood events (HFE) data page on open.canada.caArticle on the historical flood events layerFlood Hazard Identification and Mapping ProgramUpdate Frequency: Ongoing

The Atlantic Ocean Research Alliance (AORA) between Canada, the European Union and the United States was launched by the Signatories of the Galway Statement on Atlantic Ocean Cooperation in May 2013. This Dataset is bathymetry data that was collected on various surveys from 2015 to 2018 on the Celtic Explorer during transits across the Atlantic Ocean, Primarily from St. John’s Newfoundland, Canada to Galway, Ireland. The data contributes to the Seabed Mapping key area of the AORA project, which AIMS to map the remainder of the Atlantic Ocean. The bathymetry data is collected using a deep water multibeam sonar system called a Konsberg EM302.