Spatially partitioning Canada with the landsat worldwide referencing system

In this communication we present the merging of the Landsat Worldwide Reference System (WRS) and Canadian national spatial data sets representing land cover elevation, and population characteristics. The merging of the WRS grid system with other spatial data allows users to query the expected contents of each WRS frame and summarize these results nationally,. For example, after removing selected frames to reduce overlap, there are 712 overlapping frames covering Canada land mass, of these, 434 have greater than 10% forest. There are 1200 scenes for Canada when the WRS grid system is not thinned to reduce overlap. The results of the queries may be considered spatially or aspatially. The information generated from adding spatial information to the WRS grid allows for improved image selection for various sampling designs to provide national or regional information. In this communication, we present a brief summary of the data utilized and how each of these datum were created as well as the results of some queries.