The Great Boreal Forest

Canada’s Boreal Forest represents one of the world’s most valuable natural areas. Whether the measure is fresh water, intact wildlife habitat, old-growth forests or the health of traditional cultures, maps showing the Earth’s most intact and most natural forests always include the broad band of forests lying across northern Canada.

The Boreal Forest region is a massive ecosystem in the northern hemisphere, stretching around most of Russia and northern North America. On this continent, it stretches 6,000 km from Labrador through Quebec and Ontario and west to Alaska. This represents 5.9 million square kilometres (or 1.5 billion acres) - that’s about 25% of the land area of North America.

At 1.4 billion acres, Canada's Boreal Forest is an unbroken garland of green spanning our country from the Yukon to the Atlantic. The Boreal Forest is home to billions of migratory songbirds, half of North America's waterfowl, vast caribou herds, healthy populations of wolf, moose, grizzly bears, and an abundance of game fish like lake trout, northern pike and walleyes. Canada's Boreal Forest is important to our well-being because it is one of the largest reservoirs of fresh water in the world. The Boreal Forest also helps to shield us from global warming by storing more carbon in its soils, forests and wetlands than any other ecosystem on the planet. Even with the tremendous globally significant benefits the Boreal Forest provides, only 8% is protected across Canada and 12% in Ontario.

Related resources:

• The Boreal Forest: Ontario's Big Wild (PDF 544k)
• Protected Areas Toolkit