Land cover information is necessary for a large range of environmental applications related to climate impacts and adaption, emergency response, wildlife habitat, etc. In Canada, a 2008 user survey indicated that the most practical land cover data is provided in a nationwide 30 m spatial resolution format, with an update frequency of five years. In response to this need, the Canada Centre for Remote Sensing (CCRS) has generated a 30 m land cover map of Canada for the years 2010, 2015 as well as this 2020 land cover map. This land cover dataset is also the Canadian contribution to the 30 m spatial resolution 2020 Land Cover Map of North America, which is produced by Mexican, American and Canadian government institutions under a collaboration called the North American Land Change Monitoring System (NALCMS). This land cover dataset for Canada is produced using observation from Operational Land Imager (OLI) Landsat sensor. An accuracy assessment based on 832 randomly distributed samples shows that land cover data produced with this new approach has achieved 86.9% accuracy with no marked spatial disparities. - [Land Cover of Canada - Cartographic Product Collection](https://open.canada.ca/data/en/dataset/11990a35-912e-4002-b197-d57dd88836d7)

In 2015, the Earth Observation Team of the Science and Technology Branch (STB) at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) repeated the process of generating annual crop inventory digital maps using satellite imagery to for all of Canada, in support of a national crop inventory. A Decision Tree (DT) based methodology was applied using optical (Landsat-8) and radar (RADARSAT-2) based satellite images, and having a final spatial resolution of 30m. In conjunction with satellite acquisitions, ground-truth information was provided by provincial crop insurance companies and point observations from the BC Ministry of Agriculture and our regional AAFC colleagues.