Canadian National Wetlands Inventory

Introduction

The Canadian National Wetlands Inventory (CNWI) is a comprehensive publicly available national geodatabase about wetlands in Canada. Wetlands, such as marshes and swamps, are important. They provide habitats for many plants and animals, help prevent flooding, and contribute to maintaining a healthy environment.

The goal of the CNWI is to collect and compile the best available data on wetland habitats, organize them into a national geodatabase, and make it available to the public in a standardized manner. In addition, the CNWI aims to provide new data and more details for areas of the country that previously lacked wetlands information. Anyone interested, whether an individual or an organization (for example, governments, non-governmental organizations, indigenous groups, schools, land managers, businesses), can use this database to learn about wetlands across the country.

The CNWI helps Canada to fulfill its national and international commitments to protect nature and combat climate change. It informs actions to conserve and protect plant and animal species, and supports modelling of carbon storage and reporting on greenhouse gas emission reduction. That is why the CNWI focuses on gathering new information about peatlands and coastal wetlands. Peatlands store and capture carbon, while coastal wetlands are critical habitats for a variety of plants and animals, such as seagrass and shorebirds. The CNWI would be useful for training computers to recognize and understand wetlands across the country and how they change over time.

The CNWI is developed by the Canadian Wildlife Service (CWS) of Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC), in collaboration with federal, provincial and territorial governments, academia, industry, Indigenous groups and non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

Data and resources

The first release of the CNWI, as a proof of concept (Figure 1), includes data from 13 different sources across 7 provinces and territories: British Columbia, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, Ontario, Quebec, and Yukon. This release comprises approximately 4.1 million wetland features covering an estimated 40 million hectares. The source datasets are available by province/territory. The information was collected from various federal, provincial, and territorial governments, as well as non-governmental organizations. Different methods for identifying and/or classifying wetlands across various sources were standardized to be informative for the CNWI users.

The CNWI Schema is developed based on 2 main documents: the Canadian Wetland Classification System (PDF, 20.4 MB), by the National Wetlands Working Group (1997) and the Canadian Wetland Inventory (PDF, 1.1 MB) which contains the data model. To make it possible to bring all the datasets together, they are first put into a common CNWI Classification Schema, which consists of 5 major wetlands classes: Bog, Fen, Swamp, Marsh, Shallow / Open Water and 8 subclasses: Rich Fen, Poor Fen, Organic Swamp, Mineral Swamp, Organic Marsh, Mineral Marsh, Shallow Water, Open Water. Non-conforming wetlands can be categorized into 3 groups: Peatland, Mixed, and Unclassified.

For more information on the CNWI and related database, please refer to the CNWI Database User Manual (PDF, 2.3 MB) and other supporting documents listed below.

Following this first release, the CNWI will be expanded by including additional datasets and information as they become available.

Wetlands statistics

Alternate format

Contact

For more information, please contact

Environment and Climate Change Canada
14th Floor, Place Vincent Massey
351 St. Joseph Boulevard
Gatineau QC  K1A 0H3

Telephone: 819-997-2800
Toll Free: 1-800-668-6767 (in Canada only)
Email: scf-geocarto-cws-geomapping@ec.gc.ca

Related links

• CNWI data and resources
  • Open Government Portal
  • Data download link