Tuesday, June 10, 2014

2011 Census - Area of FSAs

Question

I’m looking for the land area (square kilometers or square miles) for each Forward Sortation Area – this information seems to be unusually difficult to obtain. We know that we can load the boundary file into ArcGIS and obtain it that way – but is it available in any standard geographic (tabular) format?

Answer

The geography division explained that "land area data are unofficial and are provided for the sole purpose of calculating population density. We do not calculate or publish population density for Forward Sortation Areas so we do not have any land area values for Forward Sortation Areas pre-calculated in the standard geographic tabular format that your client is looking for.

More information on land area can be found in the Census Dictionary: <http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2011/ref/dict/geo029-eng.cfm>."