Canada Land Inventory (CLI)
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.
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.
Printed maps
Scans of the CLI maps are available here.
Data
Soil capability for agriculture is available as GIS datasets. The rest of this page provides access to this data and describes how to use it.
Dataset Descriptions
For each map area, the original coverages included a HYDRO coverage (e.g. s031g), and a CLI agriculture coverage (e.g. a031g).
Usage
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.
Availability
Download CLI Agriculture from this site, in Shapefile format, by clicking on the appropriate grid cell in the image above.
All of the CLI themes can also be viewed or downloaded (in their original structure) at the Geogratis site.