Canada grows 10 percent of the world’s forest cover and 30 percent of the world’s boreal forest. There are approximately 347.7 million hectares of forests in Canada. During the past 35–40 years, Canada has converted 3.3 million hectares of its forestland to other uses, which is about 1 percent of its total forested area.
Canada is a signatory of the Kyoto Protocol and is obligated to report greenhouse gas sources and sinks associated with aforestation and deforestation. To do so, it has implemented a national forest sector carbon accounting system that brings together data from multiple resources, including a national forest inventory, growth and yield data from sample plots, statistics on change agents, and land-use change calculated from remote-sensing data. The accounting method integrates image processing and GIS analysis to monitor deforestation and calculate the carbon storage and changes, which are essential for Canadian national assessments. Read More