Multivariate maps of forest attributes for management units in Canada's boreal forest

This process involved compiling a suite of spatial layers including Landsat TM/ETM+ imagery, interpolated climate variables, topographic variables and other remote sensing products to be used as predictors and Canada’s National Forest Inventory photo plot information (1986-2010) as the source of dependant variables.Following Lochhead et al.(2017) the application used a method called kriging with external drift which relies on a system of non-linear models with spatially varying parameters to produce multivariate maps for the year 2010 at a 90m x 90m pixel resolution.

The resulting maps are clipped to each forest management area (FMA) boundary which was sourced online (www.databasin.org). For cases, where a 90 m x 90 m pixel window overlapped non-vegetated area (e.g., waterbodies) the forest attribute information was averaging using only the vegetated pixels (i.e., prorating). For more information on methods refer to the publication.