National Forestry Database Program
Last Review/Updated: April 25, 2001
The Canadian Council of Forest Ministers (CCFM) founded the "National Forestry Database Program (NFDP)" in 1990 to establish comprehensive national forestry database, to develop a public information program, and to provide forestry information to the federal, provincial and territorial policy processes.
Natural Resources Canada (NRCan), Canadian Forest Service (CFS) developed and maintains the National Forestry Database. The CFS has responsibility for disseminating national forestry statistics and for responding to questions from the public.
A Steering Committee, composed of a representative of each provincial and territorial forest management agency, along with the CFS, provides direction to enhance the database and to improve methods of reporting national forestry statistics. The committee reports to the CCFM through the deputy ministers responsible for forestry.
The National Forestry Database (NFD) is the central database used to compile the national forestry statistics that are presented in this site. The database is structured to permit a description of the level of activity in any period, and to mark change in activity and in the resource itself. Most of the provincial and territorial data appearing in the NFD are provided each year to the database managers by the provincial or territorial resource management organizations. The CFS compiles information for federal lands from data provided by the responsible federal departments. Forest inventory data are compiled every five years.
The Compendium of Canadian Forestry Statistics was a selection of statistical data from the NFD published annually. This year, the Compendium is only available on the Internet in the NFDP Website which contains virtually all of the NFD. It presents detailed data for the information gathered between 1990 and 1997 by the National Forestry Database Program, as well as key historical information for data gathered previously by other surveys. Data are presented in tabular and graphic form. The titles of each of the nine data sets which constitute the NFD are retained as topic titles in the Website. The nine data sets exist as separate entities and the data for each are collected and reported independently. They are linked by common terminology.
