Canada’s National Forest Inventory (NFI) sampling program is designed to support reporting on forests at the national scale. On the other hand, continuous maps of forest attributes are required to support strategic analyses of regional policy and management issues. We have therefore produced maps covering 4.03 × 10⁶ km² of inventoried forest area for the 2001 base year using standardised observations from the NFI photo plots (PP) as reference data. We used the k nearest neighbours (kNN) method with 26 geospatial data layers including MODIS spectral data and climatic and topographic variables to produce maps of 127 forest attributes at a 250 × 250 m resolution. The stand-level attributes include land cover, structure, and tree species relative abundance. In this article, we report only on total live aboveground tree biomass, with all other attributes covered in the supplementary data ( http://nrcresearchpress.com/doi/suppl/10.1139/cjfr-2013-0401 ). In general, deviations in predicted pixel-level values from those in a PP validation set are greater in mountainous regions and in areas with either low biomass or sparse PP sampling. Predicted pixel-level values are overestimated at small observed values and underestimated at large ones. Accuracy measures are improved through the spatial aggregation of pixels to 1 km² and beyond. Overall, these new products provide unique baseline information for strategic-level analyses of forests ( https://nfi.nfis.org ).

Land cover classification over large geographic areas using remotely sensed data is increasingly common as a result of the requirements of national inventory and monitoring programmes, scientific modelling and international environmental treaties. Although large‐area land cover products are more prevalent, standard operational protocols for their validation do not exist. This paper provides a framework for the accuracy assessment of large‐area land cover products and synthesizes some of the key decision points in the design and implementation of an accuracy assessment from the literature. The fundamental components of a validation plan are addressed and the framework is then applied to the land cover map of the forested area of Canada that is currently being produced by the Earth Observation for Sustainable Development programme. This example demonstrates the compromise between the theoretical aspects of accuracy assessment and the practical realities of implementation, over a specific jurisdiction. The framework presented in this paper provides an example for others embarking on the assessment of large‐area land cover products and can serve as the foundation for planning a statistically robust validation.

Forest inventory data often provide the required base data to enable the largearea mapping of biomass over a range of scales. However, spatially explicit estimates ofabove-ground biomass (AGB) over large areas may be limited by the spatial extent of theforest inventory relative to the area of interest (i.e., inventories not spatially exhaustive), orby the omission of inventory attributes required for biomass estimation. These spatial andattributional gaps in the forest inventory may result in an underestimation of large areaAGB. The continuous nature and synoptic coverage of remotely sensed data have led totheir increased application for AGB estimation over large areas, although the use of thesedata remains challenging in complex forest environments. In this paper, we present anapproach to generating spatially explicit estimates of large area AGB by integrating AGBestimates from multiple data sources; 1. using a lookup table of conversion factors appliedto a non-spatially exhaustive forest inventory dataset (R² = 0.64; RMSE = 16.95 t/ha), 2.applying a lookup table to unique combinations of land cover and vegetation densityoutputs derived from remotely sensed data (R² = 0.52; RMSE = 19.97 t/ha), and 3. hybridmapping by augmenting forest inventory AGB estimates with remotely sensed AGB estimates where there are spatial or attributional gaps in the forest inventory data. Over our714,852 ha study area in central Saskatchewan, Canada, the AGB estimate generated fromthe forest inventory was approximately 40 Mega tonnes (Mt); however, the inventoryestimate represents only 51% of the total study area. The AGB estimate generated from theremotely sensed outputs that overlap those made from the forest inventory based approachdiffer by only 2 %; however in total, the remotely sensed estimate is 30 % greater (58 Mt)than the estimate generated from the forest inventory when the entire study area isaccounted for. Finally, using the hybrid approach, whereby the remotely sensed inputswere used to fill spatial gaps in the forest inventory, the total AGB for the study area wasestimated at 62 Mt. In the example presented, data integration facilitates comprehensiveand spatially explicit estimation of AGB for the entire study area.