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About the Canadian National Vegetation Classification

What is the Canadian National Vegetation Classification?

Western redcedar forest

A related initiative to develop a Canadian National Vegetation Classification (CNVC) is being led by the Canadian section of NatureServe (formerly, the Association for Biodiversity Information), in collaboration with numerous governmental and non-governmental partners. The CNVC will be the Canadian component of the International Classification of Ecological Communities (ICEC), a hierarchical, taxonomic, vegetation classification that combines information about vegetation structure, species composition and habitat characteristics to classify all vegetation communities into associations and their first-order aggregates, alliances.

The ICEC was developed by NatureServe together with the Ecological Society of America, The Nature Conservancy and associated natural heritage programs and conservation data centres. It is being concurrently implemented in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and several Caribbean and Latin American countries.