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2006 Agricultural Ecumene Census Division Boundary File

The 2006 Agricultural Ecumene Census Division Boundary File delineates Canada's agriculture ecumene. Ecumene, a word derived from the Greek root oixos meaning inhabited and nenon meaning space, is a term used by geographers to indicate inhabited land. It generally refers to land where people have made their permanent home, and to all work areas that are considered occupied and used for agricultural or any other economic purposes.

The use of an agriculture ecumene facilitates the display of data. By effectively masking non-ecumene areas of Canada, it restricts the display of agriculture characteristics to those areas where agriculture activity is sufficiently concentrated.

The agricultural ecumene is based on dissemination areas selected according to three separate indicators of agricultural intensity. To ensure visibility for small-scale thematic mapping, the detailed boundaries of the large main ecumene pockets have been generalized while those of the relatively small, isolated ecumene pockets have been enlarged and generalized.

The Agricultural Ecumene Census Division Boundary File has three separate layers of information. The first layer contains the agricultural ecumene with integrated census division boundaries. The second layer contains the boundaries of all census divisions in Canada. The third layer contains the provincial/territorial boundaries. The second and third layers give users a choice of geographic detail when mapping the agricultural ecumene.

The ecumene boundary layer incorporates the Great Lakes, large inland lakes and the shoreline around Canada. A flag is used to distinguish between land and water polygons. Geographic coordinates are in latitude/longitude and are based on the North American Datum of 1983 (NAD83).

The Agricultural Ecumene Census Division Boundary File is available in ESRI^® shapefile format and MapInfo^® tab file format. The file may be downloaded free of charge from the Statistics Canada website. See the technical specifications for more details on record layouts and file formats.

Reference date

The geographic reference date is a date determined by Statistics Canada to finalize the geographic framework for which census data are collected, tabulated and reported. The reference date for the geographic area boundaries in digital and cartographic boundary files is January 1, 2006.