Wiki Navigation

Welcome to Hectares BC

Hectares BC

Project Summary

Hectares BC is a pilot project to test the concept of a new tool for geospatial data analysis in the natural resource area. The provincial government in British Columbia has a wealth of geospatial data but limited staff and tools for its analysis. Hectares BC will improve access to summarized, integrated, geospatial data by a wider range of clients and will deliver timely, consistent responses to clients with a minimum of intervention by geomatics professionals. It will also provide an analytical framework that is superior to what is currently available for use by these professionals as well as other advanced users of geospatial data outside of government.

Hectares BC will create a web application and associated raster database by July 2008. If the pilot is successful, we anticipate data custodians and users collectively will find it to be sufficiently beneficial to continue to maintain it over time. All of the data included in Hectares BC will have been determined by the data custodians to be suitable for release to the public (the vast majority is already accessible but in a form that limits its use).

Recent Updates

The Application

http://www.hectaresbc.org/app/habc/HaBC.html

IE6 Users - If you experience errors with the above link use this link instead:
http://www.hectaresbc.org:22080/app/habc/HaBC.html

Tutorials

Hectares BC Tutorials

Reporting Bugs & Enhancements

To report a bug or request and enhancment:

Click the login link at the top/right of this page
Enter the following credentials:
- User Name: guest
- Password: guest
Select the 'New Ticket' link that will appear in the upper right once logged on.

The HaBC Grid

The HaBC grid cell size will be 1 hectare. This is an ideal unit of area in both terms of size and shape as:

A hectare is 100 metres on each side. Most provincial spatial data inputs (biogeoclimatic zones, climate areas, baseline thematic mapping) have ground accuracies that are similar to or larger than 100 metres. Inputs that have finer resolutions can be easily summarized into totals within each square hectare.
There are about 95 million hectares in the Province, which (at one row per hectare) is well within the practical size limits for a usable database table.
With square hectares and a grid, both data processing (calculating grid values from input data) and data summarization (calculating output attributes for roll-ups) can use raster mathematics, which provide substantial processing efficiencies.