| Abstract | The purpose of this paper is twofold. The first part provides an overview of a new, seamless digital data set showing vegetation and land cover categories over all of Canada derived from Remote Sensing
(RS) imagery in raster format. The second part describes the conversion of the data set from raster to vector format to make the data set suitable for integration into Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Data were obtained from the Advanced
Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) sensor operating on board the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellites which have a resolution of 1.1 km. The vegetation and land cover data set includes twelve
categories, all interpreted from the AVHRR imagery. The paper focuses on the methodology involved in image compositing, the techniques of image classification, the definition and description of vegetation and land cover categories, challenges of
raster to vector conversion and related generalization, and finally the integration of the data set into a GIS environment. |