I am working on improving the data availability for some of the major northern Canadian arctic communities, as improving this data in OpenStreetMap will also improve the Arctic Web Map project that is using OSM data.

I have downloaded the shapefiles from NRCan and I used ogr2ogr to convert them from EPSG:4140 to EPSG:4326. Then I am importing them a layer at a time using JOSM. I am using the CanVec Feature Catalogue and OSM CanVec Feature Guide for mapping values.

For the vegetation layer “085f05_11_0_VE_1240019_2” (Wooded area classified — polygons) I imported the shapefile into QGIS and used a dissolve operation to combine all the polygons. Then a Douglas generalize filter with a tolerance of 0.0001 was applied to remove redundant vertices. This reduced the vertex count from 363,000 to 40,000. Next I opened that shapefile in JOSM and changed the tags to https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:natural=wood and manually merged the polygons with identical polygons in the neighbouring imported tiles.

I will continue importing one layer at a time until this NTS tile is complete.