Hundreds and hundreds of satellite scenes grouped into tiles have been painstakingly pieced together by Natural Resources Canada to create one huge photograph of the country as seen from space. The result is a massive mosaic of digital images 85 gigabytes big — that’s over 100 CD’s worth of data.

Thanks to compression technology that has reduced the file to 3.3 gigabytes and a collaboration between the Canadian Forest Service and the Canadian Space Agency called the “Earth Observation for Sustainable Development of Forests”, this gigantic image — the highest-resolution image of Canada freely available — can now be downloaded to your computer.

“It’s just one example of the sort of products we’re creating using space-based earth observation technologies,” says Jim Wood, Director of Forest Resources at the Canadian Forest Service’s Pacific Forestry Centre in Victoria.

Uses of the composite of satellite scenes vary as much as the users. Individual provinces can be clipped out for use in tourism brochures or at regional planning sessions or even as a backdrop for television news weather reports.

Research scientist Dr. Mike Wulder says that besides being a valuable source of research and monitoring data, the mosaic is unrivalled as a tool to explain the vastness, variability, and uniqueness of Canadian landscapes.

Physical scientist Graham Stinson does spatial carbon budget modelling. “We work with many GIS thematic layers but this Canada mosaic shows the geographic context of forest landscapes that we are modelling in a way that can't be done easily with layers that show only specific types of geographic information.”

Victoria and Vancouver

• Canada Forest Service
• Canadian Space Agency
• Pacific Forestry Center