National Soil Database
The NSDB is a collection of geospatial datasets which contain soil, landscape, and climatic data for all of Canada. It serves as the national archive for land resources information that was collected by federal and provincial field surveys, or created by land data analysis projects.
Datasets that have been superseded have been made available in the National Soil Database Archive.
The NSDB includes GIS datasets at a variety of scales, and the characteristics of each named soil series. The principal types of data holdings (ordered by scale) are as follows.
National Ecological Framework
- intended for use at scales of 1:30 million to 1:1 million
- coverage includes the entire land mass of Canada
- polygons are nested groupings of Soil Landscapes of Canada polygons
- data is available from other federal and provincial agencies
Soil Landscapes of Canada (SLC)
- scale of 1:1 million
- coverage includes the entire land mass of Canada
- data includes major soil and landscape attributes
Canada Land Inventory (CLI)
- scale of 1:250,000
- coverage includes most agricultural lands in Canada
- data includes capability for Agriculture, Forestry, Wildlife, Recreation, Ungulates
- produced in the 1960's, 1970's and early 1980s
- better soils data and CLI ratings at larger scales are available (Detailed Soil Surveys)
Detailed Soil Surveys (DSS)
- scale varies (1:20,000 to 1:250,000)
- coverage includes much of the significant agricultural areas of Canada
- data content varies, availability of digital data varies
- printed provincial indexes are available; query the NSDB data holdings
National Pedon Database
- contains pedon data that has been collected from across Canada
- standardized data for over 100 soil properties
Soil name and layer data
- includes soil characteristics and soil layer information for all of the named soils of Canada