Skip to content | Skip to institutional links

Common menu bar links

Canada Land Inventory (CLI) - Overview

GENERAL OVERVIEW

The Canada Land Inventory is a comprehensive multi-disciplinary land inventory of rural Canada, covering over 2.5 million square kilometers of land and water . Land capability for agriculture, forestry, wildlife, recreation, wildlife ( ungulates and waterfowl) was mapped. Over 1000 mapsheets at the 1:250,000 scale were created during the 1960's, 70s, and early 80's. Although the information is old, and better information is available for some areas as part of more recent soil surveys, the interpretations are still largely valid, and many jurisdictions still use them for land use planning purposes.

In the late 1990's, CanSIS converted the original CLI Agriculture datasets to a component-based file structure. This site provides access to those datasets and describes how to use them in that format.

Soil Capability for Agriculture

There are seven classes used to rate agricultural land capability. Class 1 lands have the highest and Class 7 lands the lowest capability to support agricultural land use activities. Subclasses are used to identify specific limiting factors for each class.

Extent of the Soil Capability for Agriculture

Dataset Descriptions

For each map area, the original coverages included a HYDRO coverage (e.g. s031g), and a CLI agriculture coverage (e.g. a031g).

HYDRO coverage
CLI coverage
1. Polygon Attribute Table (.PAT)
2. Component Table(.CMP)

Usage

Availability

Download CLI Agriculture from this site, in ARC/INFO EXPORT format.

All of the CLI themes can also be viewed or downloaded (in the original structure) at the Geogratis site.

Obtaining NSDB datasets in other formats and media.

Further Information

CITATION:	Canada Land Inventory, National Soil DataBase, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada. 1998.
COPYRIGHT:	Anyone may use these data free of charge, provided they acknowledge Agriculture and Agri-food Canada's authorship. AAFC retains exclusive rights, title, and ownership of this data. Copying and redistribution of part or all of this dataset is acceptable, provided that the contents of this file are included with the redistribution. AAFC may be unable to answer queries about these data if they were obtained through a third party.
LIMITATIONS:	This dataset may contain errors and omissions that may be corrected in subsequent releases.

Source: Canada Land Inventory