Canada Land Inventory


The Canada Land Inventory is a multi-disciplinary land inventory of rural Canada.
Conceptualized in the early 1960s by the Department of Forestry and Rural Development, the CLI was a federal-provincial project that lasted from 1963 to 1995 and produced maps which indicated the capability of land to sustain agriculture, forestry, recreation and wildlife; its geographic extent was all of Canada except the North.
CLI used a common classification scheme and common mapping scales. Land capability for agriculture, forestry, land-use, recreation, wildlife were mapped The large amount of data generated by the CLI saw the early adoption of the world's first geographic information system, called the Canada Geographic Information System.

Current use

Since 1995, the CLI agriculture data have been taken over by the Department of Agriculture to continue rating agricultural land capability. The CLI in this modified form consists of a soil survey with rankings from 1 to 7, with Class 1 soil having no limitations for arable crop production and Class 7 having no capability for agricultural activities. Classes 1-3 are considered prime agricultural land, and are protected by land use policies in certain provinces, including Ontario. Classes 2-6 have certain limitations for arable crop production, denoted by sub-classes which specify the limitations of the soil. The results are mapped on 1:250,000 NTS grids.