Quantifying and Mapping Conservation Lands in Canada's Boreal Forest

Client: Forest Products Association of Canada

Spatialworks was contracted by the Forest Products Association of Canada to analyze all lands associated with guidelines, policies and regulations across its member company lands in Canada's boreal forest.

Rather than create a one-time summary requiring company staff to prepare maps and data to varying standards, Spatialworks proposed a GIS-based software package to simplify and standardize the collection of the spatial information. The Conservation Lands Query Tool (CLQT) was developed by Spatialworks to:

• Maintain a list of all policies guidelines and regulations by province, classified to a consistent set of Conservation Lands categories allowing compilation and summary across the country
• Overlay forest inventory and ecological spatial layers to provide consistent summaries across Canada (e.g. how overlapping rules were handled)
• Generate a portable summary dataset combining all polices, guidelines and regulations classifed to consisnt national categories for analysis
• Provide a tool that could be used to rapidly update results in the future

Spatialworks trained staff of more than 20 of Canada's top forest companies in the use of the CLQT. Company staff sent CLQT output data to Spatialworks for final compilation and mapping.

Spatialworks was subsequently contracted by the Ontario Forest Industry Association to extend the CLQT to analyze impacts of the guidelines, policies and regulations on timber volume for its member companies.