HYDRO coverage (SLC version 2.2)

Definition

This coverage represents land, fresh water and marine water within Canada.

Description

The version 2.2 hydro coverage is more complete than earlier versions. It now contains those water bodies that were found previously in the SLC coverage, and polygon topology has been added. This coverage is designed to be used in conjunction with the SLC coverage.

Usage

The hydro coverage can now be used as a mask to shade areas of the SLC polygons which consist of fresh water or ocean. The TYPE field in the hydro coverage PAT identifies each polygon, where:

L	=	Land
O	=	Ocean
W	=	Fresh Water

For exact instructions the use of this coverage, see How to map SLC data

Background

This coverage provides base map information regarding the locations of major water bodies: ocean shorelines, and major rivers and lakes. It includes all lakes greater than 3 mm x 3 mm (1000 ha) that are visible on the 1:1,000,000 NTS topographic maps. Intermittent lakes were not digitized.

Figure 1: The HYDRO coverage.

effective version 2.2