Forest summaries

What is a forest?

“A dense growth of trees and underbrush covering a large tract” according to Webster’s online dictionary. Forests can range from a small plot of trees in an urban park to large uninhabited tracts of trees. Forests are a complex community of living things including mosses, plants, shrubs, trees and wildlife.

Birds and mammals vary in their use of forests. A white-throated sparrow may require a patch of young forest less than two hectares in size. A black-backed woodpecker may require up to 40 hectares of older forest to live in. A wolverine’s home range can be up to 100,000 hectares.

Forests in Ontario include commercially managed forest, protected forest, unmanaged tracts in the far north, privately owned forest and forest on First Nations lands.

Total area by land class

The Forest Resources of Ontario 2001 was the first in the report series to utilize satellite data. This change allowed for a complete breakdown of all the land and water in the province. The satellite data used in this report was compiled by the MNR between 2002 and 2008 and is based on Landsat 7 imagery and updates. Satellite imagery provides an excellent overview of broad land classes including forests, but does not provide the detail of forest resources inventories (FRI) which form the basis for most of the data in this report. The 26-class data set has been summarized into six broad groups as outlined in the table below.

Map of landcover classes

Enlarge Map of landcover classes

Total provincial area by land class and ownership (area in hectares)

Land Class	Crown	Parks and protected areas	Other	Total	Proportion
Water	16,967,051	1,943,058	525,370	19,435,479	18.1%
Wetland	8,137,549	1,100,620	239,219	9,477,388	8.8%
Field/Agric.	34,434	8,172	5,358,927	5,401,533	5.0%
Other	698,842	448,111	993,518	2,140,471	2.0%
Treed Wetland	12,685,193	1,202,999	1,083,755	14,971,947	13.9%
Forest	44,128,288	5,846,953	6,118,363	56,093,603	52.2%
Total	82,651,356	10,549,912	14,319,153	107,520,421	100.0%

Total provincial area by land class

Forest resources inventories (FRI)

Traditionally, The Forest Resources of Ontario report series uses FRI to summarize provincial statistics on forest cover as well as land and water classes. Each FRO report is based on a slightly different land base due to the availability and currency of inventories. The 1963 report covered over 70 million hectares (66% of the province), while reports since have are generally limited to the Area of the Undertaking (AOU) and represents the area where forest management is practiced. The current set of inventories covers over 45 million hectares of Ontario.

The FRI is a detailed forest map compiled on an ongoing basis by the MNRF and its industry partners. Ontario has been inventorying its forests in this basic style since 1922. With the advent of geographic information systems (GIS) in the late 1980s, digital inventories now provide detailed spatial information about Ontario’s forests. The technology to create and update inventories has been enhanced greatly, with a move from traditional black and white photos to detailed 3D enhanced imagery.

The FRI classifies a land base into land classes called “polytype” or polygon type. This class includes water, rock, muskeg, unclassified lands as well as productive forest. Each delineated forest polygon is called a “stand”. Each forest stand is further classified by its ownership, land use type, development stage and ecological characteristics. A detailed description of what is contained in an inventory is available in the Forest Information Manual (2009) available at Ontario.ca.

Inventory age is determined by the age of the photography used for the inventory or by the year of update. The inventories used in this report are sourced from the current set of forest management plans, spanning 2008 to 2013. Each inventory has been updated for harvest, fire and insect damage, as well as silviculture activities and renewal surveys up to 2013-14.

Summary tables in this report based on the AOU will utilize FRI, while satellite summaries will be restricted to landcover data. A small portion of non-Crown land within the AOU does not currently have FRI available, and will be based on landcover data.

Sample forest resources inventory map

Enlarge Sample forest resources inventory map

Managed forest area (AOU)

The area in Ontario where forest management occurs is referred to as the “Area of the Undertaking” or AOU. This version includes both MNR-71 (AOU) and MNR-74 (Whitefeather). Using Landcover, the total managed forest area by ownership is as follows:

Area by land class within the AOU

Land class	Crown	Parks and protected areas	Other	Total	Proportion
Water	4,623,644	964,341	276,275	5,864,260	13.0%
Wetland	296,676	73,119	97,938	467,734	1.0%
Field/Agric.	13,725	1,777	580,291	595,793	1.3%
Other	282,800	83,247	290,591	656,638	1.5%
Treed Wetland	1,403,805	190,239	182,483	1,776,527	3.9%
Forest	27,793,559	3,245,657	4,578,838	35,618,055	79.2%
Total	34,414,210	4,558,380	6,006,417	44,979,007	100.0%

Total AOU area by land class

Although all managed Crown forest within this zone is inventoried, there are some small gaps in the FRI. These gaps include several blocks of private land in the northwest and southern regions, Lake Nipigon and its islands (mostly parks), and Wabikimi Provincial Park, which contains land within and outside the AOU. All subsequent FRI summaries will not include this uninventoried area (see table below).

Uninventoried area within the AOU

Land class	Lake Nipigon Unmanaged Crown	Lake Nipigon Parks/ Protected Areas	Lake Nipigon Other Owners	Private Blocks	Wabikimi Provincial Park (within AOU)	Total
Water	401,290	52,614	87	31,660	124,499	610,149
Wetland	49	32	119	1,858	6,589	8,647
Other	19	31	55	38,858	1,694	40,655
Treed Wetland	14	92	13	10,622	29,572	40,313
Forest	669	43,222	3,694	154,950	536,192	738,727
Total Area	402,040	95,991	3,966	237,948	698,547	1,438,492

Managed forest–FRI area summaries

Forest resource inventories classify area into several generalized water and land types. The Forest Management Planning Technical Specifications of the Forest Information Manual (2009) has a detailed description of each polygon type and how they are classified in an inventory. Please note that the methodology for classifying polygons differs from the landcover (above) and the class areas will not be the same.

Area by land class and ownership based on FRI

Forest type	Crown	Parks and protected areas	Other	Total	Proportion
Water	3,931,971	144,027	700,035	4,776,033	11.0%
Open Wetland	892,943	193,904	113,945	1,200,792	2.8%
Grass/Meadow	6,719	220,990	636	228,344	0.5%
Agricultural Land	1,945	431,435	214	433,593	1.0%
Rock	224,341	84,481	97,788	406,610	0.9%
Unclassified/Other	263,981	354,702	17,964	636,646	1.5%
Treed Wetland	1,037,874	71,243	140,022	1,249,139	2.9%
Brush/Alder	644,530	162,841	58,754	866,125	2.0%
Productive Forest	27,096,419	2,536,280	4,131,301	33,763,999	77.5%
Total Area	34,100,722	4,199,903	5,260,659	43,561,284	100.0%

Total AOU forest by ownership

Forest area in the FRI is delineated as “areas that are capable of producing trees but may not be capable of timber harvesting”. Forest data within the FRI has significantly more data fields populated than non-forested data. These forest attributes include species composition, stocking, age and productivity classes and will be discussed further in forest summaries later in this chapter.