Provincially significant peatlands are a type of protected area designated under The Peatlands Stewardship Act and The Provincially Significant Peatlands Regulation.Provincially significant peatlands are a type of protected area designation under The Peatlands Stewardship Act and The Provincially Significant Regulation. Peatlands designated as provincially significant are legally protected from resource development activities, including peat harvesting, mining, hydro-electric development, logging, and agricultural activities. See The Peatlands Stewardship Act for additional details https://www.gov.mb.ca/nrnd/forest/land-management/peatlands/index.html. 

Manitoba's Provincial Forest Boundaries (version 6): There are currently 15 provincial forests totalling almost 22,000 km2. Attributes include the name of the provincial forest, the year it was established and its area. Detailed descriptions of Manitoba’s provincial forests are provided in the Provincial Forest Act Regulations.Manitoba's Provincial Forest B oundaries ( V ersion 6 ). Manitoba's provincial forests reserve certain areas in the province for perpetual growth of timber, preserve the forest cover thereon and provide for a reasonable use of all the resources that the forest lands contain. All Crown lands within a provincial forest are withdrawn from disposition, sale, settlement or occupancy, except under authority of the Forest Act . Before the Province of Manitoba was established, European settlers were promised 160 acres of free land if they lived on it and cleared it for agriculture. As a result, farms began replacing our southern forests. The federal government decided they must retain some forests for building material. In 1885 , they established Turtle Mountain, Spruce Woods and Riding Mountain (now a national park) as timber reserves. Duck Mountain and Porcupine Mountain followed in 1906. What started out as federal timber reserves 100 years ago have become our provincial forests of today. Manitoba has 15 provincial forests , totalling almost 22,000 sq. km . These forests are among the highest quality timber stands in the province. Today, our provincial forests are much more than reserves for timber. They are also places for wildlife, recreation and research. Control of Manitoba's forests was transferred from the federal to the provincial governments in 1930. Provincial forests are Crown lands owned by the people of Manitoba. The feature class name (BDY_MB_PROV_FOREST_PY) components include: 1. ISO 19115 Topic Category Name (BDY for boundary); 2. Location code (MB for Manitoba); 3. Intuitive or descriptive name (PROV_FOREST); 4. Data/geometry type (PY for polygon); 5. Version number (v 6 ).Manitoba's provincial forests include Agassiz Provincial Forest, Belair Provincial Forest, Brightstone Sand Hills Provincial Forest, Cat Hills Provincial Forest, Cormorant Provincial Forest, Duck Mountain, Moose Creek Provincial Forest, Northwest Angle Provincial Forest, Porcupine Provincial Forest, Sandilands Provincial Forest, Spruce Woods Provincial Forest, Swan-Pelican Provincial Forest, Turtle Mountain Provincial Forest, Wampum Provincial Forest, and Whiteshell Provincial Forest.Detailed descriptions of Manitoba’s Provincial Forests are provided in the Provincial Forest Act Regulations. The dataset includes the following fields : Name / Nom Alias Description PROV_FOREST_ID Provincial Forest ID / No de la forêt provinciale Provincial Forest identifier Identificateur de la forêt provinciale PROV_FOREST_NAME Provincial Forest Name Provincial Forest name -- NOM_FORET_PROV Nom de la forêt provinciale -- Nom de la forêt provinciale ESTABLISHED Year Established / Année d’établissement The year that the provincial forest was established L’année où la forêt provinciale a été établie AREA_HA Area / Surface (Hectares) Area in hectares La surface en hectares

Priority for snow removal on the road network according to three service levels (1, 2 and 3) or under provincial jurisdiction (MTQ) .attributs:ID - Unique IdentifierPriority - Service Level or Provincial Jurisdiction (MTQ)**This third party metadata element was translated using an automated translation tool (Amazon Translate).**

Organic soils in the boreal forest commonly store as much carbon as the vegetation above ground. While recent efforts through the National Forest Inventory has yielded new spatial datasets of forest structure across the vast area of Canada’s boreal forest, organic soils are poorly mapped. In this geospatial dataset, we produce a map primarily of forested and treed peatlands, those with more than 40 cm of peat accumulation and over 10% tree canopy cover. National Forest Inventory ground plots were used to identify the range of forest structure that corresponds to the presence of over 40 cm of peat soils. Areas containing that range of forest cover were identified using the National Forest Inventory k-NN forest structure maps and assigned a probability (0-100% as integer) of being a forested or treed peatland according to a statistical model. While this mapping product captures the distribution of forested and treed peatlands at a 250 m resolution, open, completely treeless peatlands are not fully captured by this mapping product as forest cover information was used to create the maps. The methodology used in the creation of this product is described in:Thompson DK, Simpson BN, Beaudoin A. 2016. Using forest structure to predict the distribution of treed boreal peatlands in Canada. Forest Ecology and Management, 372, 19-27. https://cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/publications?id=36751 This distribution uses an updated forest attribute layer current to 2011 from:Beaudoin A, Bernier PY, Villemaire P, Guindon L, Guo XJ. 2017. Species composition, forest properties and land cover types across Canada’s forests at 250m resolution for 2001 and 2011. Natural Resources Canada, Canadian Forest Service, Laurentian Forestry Centre, Quebec, Canada. https://doi.org/10.23687/ec9e2659-1c29-4ddb-87a2-6aced147a990 Additionally, this distribution varies slightly from the original published in 2016 in that here slope data is derived from the CDEM: https://open.canada.ca/data/en/dataset/7f245e4d-76c2-4caa-951a-45d1d2051333 The above peatland probability map was further processed to delineate bogs vs fens (based on mapped Larix content via the k-NN maps), as well as an approximation of the extent of open peatlands using EOSD data. The result is a 9-type peatland map with a more complete methodology as detailed in: Webster, K. L., Bhatti, J. S., Thompson, D. K., Nelson, S. A., Shaw, C. H., Bona, K. A., Hayne, S. L., & Kurz, W. A. (2018). Spatially-integrated estimates of net ecosystem exchange and methane fluxes from Canadian peatlands. Carbon Balance and Management, 13(1), 16. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13021-018-0105-5 In plain text, the legend for the 9-class map is as follows:value="0" label="not peat" alpha="0"value="1" label="Open Bog" alpha="255" color="#0a4b32"value="2" label="Open Poor Fen" alpha="255" color="#5c5430"value="3" label="Open Rich Fen" alpha="255" color="#792652"value="4" label="Treed Bog" alpha="255" color="#6a917b"value="5" label="Treed Poor Fen" alpha="255" color="#aba476"value="6" label="Treed Rich Fen" alpha="255" color="#af7a8f"value="7" label="Forested Bog" alpha="255" color="#aad7bf"value="8" label="Forested Poor Fen" alpha="255" color="#fbfabc"value="9" label="Forested Rich Fen" alpha="255" color="#ffb6db"This colour scale is given in qml/xml format in the resources below. The 9-type peatland map from Webster et al 2018 was further refined slightly following two simple conditions: (1) any 250-m raster cell with greater than 40% pine content is classified as upland (non-peat); (2) all 250-m raster cells classified as water or agriculture via the NRCan North American Land Cover Monitoring System (https://doi.org/10.3390/rs9111098) is also classified as non-peatland (value of zero in the 9-class map. This mapping scheme was used at a regional scale in the following paper: Thompson, D. K., Simpson, B. N., Whitman, E., Barber, Q. E., & Parisien, M.-A. (2019). Peatland Hydrological Dynamics as A Driver of Landscape Connectivity and Fire Activity in the Boreal Plain of Canada. Forests, 10(7), 534. https://doi.org/10.3390/f10070534 And is reproduced here at a national scale. Note that this mapping product does not fully capture all permafrost peatland features covered by open canopy spruce woodland with lichen ground cover. Nor are treeless peatlands near the northern treeline captured in the training data, resulting in unknown mapping quality in those regions.

Important sites: reproduction, feeding and concentration area. Data extracted from the Fish Habitat Management Information System (FHAMIS) according to a literature review of documents produced between 1976 and 1999.

Atlantic sturgeon. Important sites: reproduction, feeding juvenile and adult concentration area. Data extracted from the Fish Habitat Management Information System (FHAMIS) according to a literature review of documents produced between 1978 and 2002.

Ecologically and Biologically Significant Areas (EBSAs) are areas within Canada's oceans that have been identified through formal scientific assessments as having special biological or ecological significance when compared with the surrounding marine ecosystem.Failure to define an area as an EBSA does not mean that it is unimportant ecologically. All areas serve ecological functions to some extent and require sustainable management. Rather, areas identified as EBSAs should be viewed as the most important areas where, with existing knowledge, regulators and marine users should be particularly risk averse to ensure ecosystems remain healthy and productive.Why are EBSAs identified?EBSA information is used to inform marine planning, including environmental assessment and the siting of marine-based activities, by:- Informing and guiding project-specific or regional environmental assessments;- Informing and guiding industries and regulators in their planning and operations, for example: EBSAs have been acknowledged and referred to (often as "Special Areas" or "Potentially Sensitive Areas") in oil and gas related assessments;- EBSA information has been provided to proponents of submarine cable projects to be used for route planning purposes;- Informing and guiding Integrated Oceans Management (IOM) process within five Large Ocean Management Areas (LOMAs) and twelve marine bioregions;- Serving as a basis for the identification of Areas of Interest (AOIs) and of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) (individually and in the context of planning bioregional networks of MPAs).How are EBSAs identified?The process used to identify EBSAs is generally comprised of two phases. The first phase involves compiling scientific data and knowledge of a marine area's ecosystems - notably fish species, marine mammals, sea birds, marine flora, marine productivity, physical and chemical conditions and geology. "Knowledge" includes experiential knowledge of long-time uses of the areas. In some cases (e.g., in the Arctic), substantial efforts are taken to collect traditional knowledge on ecosystems and environmental conditions from community members, fish harvests, hunters and individuals whose knowledge of the study area complement often helps fill scientific data gaps.In the second phase, the available information for a marine area (e.g. a bioregion) is assessed against five nationally-established science-based criteria including:- Uniqueness: How distinct is the ecosystem of an area compared to surrounding ones?- Aggregation: Whether or not species populate or convene to the study area?- Fitness consequence: How critical the area is to the life history of the species that use it (e.g. is it a spawning or feeding ground)?- Naturalness: How pristine or disturbed by human activities is the study area?- Resilience: What is the ability of the ecosystem to bounce back if it is disturbed?Progress to date and next stepsEBSAs have been identified for large portions of Canada's Atlantic and Pacific Oceans as well as most of the Arctic oceans. EBSAs will continue to be identified in priority areas as resources become available to carry out the process. The boundaries or locations of existing EBSAs may be modified to reflect both new knowledge and changing environmental conditions.

Represents the boundary line of Saskatchewan Crown resource lands designated as provincial forests as described in The Forest Resources Management Regulations, F-19.1 Reg 1, amended June 2020.Boundaries of the Canwood, Nisbet, Fort a la Corne, Torch River, and Porcupine Provincial Forests are described, as well as the southern portion of the Northern Provincial Forest. Crown resource lands contained within these boundaries are designated as provincial forest. Certain lands have been deemed to be withdrawn from the provincial forest pursuant to subsection 12(4) of the Act. The Forest Resources Management Act The Forest Resources Management Regulations The provincial forest boundary is described by clauses and subclauses in The Forest Resources Management Regulations. Each provincial forest boundary description clause and subclause has a corresponding line feature in FORESTRY.PLANNING_Forest_Boundary. Clause descriptions position provincial forest boundary line features according to Saskatchewan’s Land Survey System by Township, Range, and Meridian. Subclause descriptions further positions provincial forest boundary line features within the clause. When a subclause describes the provincial forest boundary according to a water body or water course bank, line features are digitized from the Saskatchewan Geospatial Imagery Collaborative 2016 three-band (red, green, blue) SPOT 6 and 7 satellite imagery mosaic, pan-sharpened to 1.5 m resolution (IMAGERY.SGIC_SPOT_RGB_2016_Ref). In certain situation, applying this satellite imagery to the provincial forest boundary description results in a gap between land and water. In such cases, in order to maintain a contiguous boundary, a new line feature is created that has no corresponding clause and subclause in The Forest Resources Management Regulations. These “Land to Water Gap” features are identified as such in the SUBCLAUSE_DESCR field. When a subclause describes the provincial forest boundary according to the Saskatchewan Land Survey System, line features are extracted from Information Services Corporation CADASTRE data (CADASTRE.SG_SECTION, .SG_QUARTERSECTION, .SG_LEGALSUBDIVISION, .surface, .boundary, .right_of_way). By convention, the west boundary of a line feature is defined by the vector west of the road allowance and the south boundary of a line feature is defined by the vector south of the road allowance. In certain situation, applying this convention to the provincial forest boundary description results in a gap created by an adjacent east or north road allowance. In such cases, in order to maintain a contiguous boundary, a new line feature is created that has no corresponding clause and subclause in The Forest Resources Management Regulations. These “Road Allowance Gap” features are identified as such in the SUBCLAUSE_DESCR field. In spite of west / south boundary road allowance convention, when a road allowance forms the boundary of the provincial forest, in FORESTRY.PLANNING_Forest_Boundary, the line feature is drawn such that the road allowance is excluded from the provincial forest.

Represents the gross area boundary within which Saskatchewan Crown resource lands are designated as provincial forests.For the entire Canwood, Nisbet, Fort a la Corne, Torch River, and Porcupine Provincial Forests, and the southern portion of the Northern Provincial Forest, boundaries follow the textual descriptions found in The Forest Resources Management Regulations, F-19.1 Reg 1, amended June 2020. For the northern, eastern and western portions of the Northern Provincial Forest, boundaries were sourced from the SaskGIS Provincial Boundary data set (ADMINISTRATIVE.provincial_boundary) produced by Information Services Corporation. This data set depicts the provincial boundary of the province of Saskatchewan as reflected in the respective jurisdictional boundary acts, and is kept current on a monthly basis. The version used here has an effective date of 31 May 2020. Crown resource lands contained within these boundaries are designated as provincial forest. Certain lands have been deemed to be withdrawn from the provincial forest pursuant to subsection 12(4) of the Act. The Forest Resources Management Act The Forest Resources Management Regulations

A single-tier municipality doesn't form part of an upper-tier municipality and assumes all municipal responsibilities set out under the Municipal Act and other Provincial legislation. A lower-tier municipality forms part of an upper-tier municipality. Municipal responsibilities set out under the Municipal Act and other Provincial legislation are split between the upper-tier and lower-tier municipalities.