Alberta Census Division Map with Population and Density

How to use this map

Pick a map type along the top and the map redraws. Divisions colours the nineteen census divisions so no two neighbours share a fill, Density shades them by people per square kilometre, Cities sizes the forty six municipalities above five thousand people, Rivers draws the major named rivers, and Satellite swaps the flat colours for real satellite imagery, and Blank outline gives you black on white for printing. Click any division, or any row in the table, and its figures appear in the Selection panel.

Use the plus and minus buttons at the top right of the map to zoom, then drag to pan. On a phone you can pinch instead. The zoom controls never appear in the downloaded image.

Why the divisions have numbers instead of names

Alberta's census divisions are not governments. They have no councils, no budgets and no offices. Statistics Canada created them purely as a way of grouping municipalities for reporting, and their official names are simply Division No. 1 through Division No. 19.

That makes Alberta different from most of the rest of the country. In Quebec a census division is usually a municipalité régionale de comté with real powers. In Ontario it is usually a county or a regional municipality. In British Columbia it is a regional district. In Alberta the working second level units are counties and municipal districts, and there are around eighty of them, which do not line up with the nineteen census divisions at all.

A map labelled Division No. 7 tells you nothing, so each division here carries the name of its largest urban community alongside the number. Division No. 6 is Calgary, No. 11 is Edmonton, No. 16 is Fort McMurray. The official name stays in the table and in the CSV export, so nothing is lost.

The two city problem

Alberta is the most concentrated province in this series after Quebec, and it concentrates differently. Quebec has one dominant metropolis. Alberta has two, and they are nearly the same size.

Division No. 6 holds 1,590,639 people, which is 37.3 percent of Alberta. Division No. 11 holds 1,462,041, which is 34.3 percent. Between them that is 71.6 percent of the province's population living on 4.5 percent of its land. No other pair of divisions in Canada splits a province so evenly and so completely.

Turn that around and the emptiness is just as stark. Division No. 17, the boreal north around Slave Lake, is 190,434 square kilometres, thirty percent of Alberta, and holds about 65,000 people. Division No. 4, in the southeast around Hanna, has 9,220 people on 21,055 square kilometres, which works out to 0.4 per square kilometre.

Satellite imagery, and how it is fitted to the map

The Satellite map type replaces the flat division colours with real imagery of Alberta. It comes from NASA, specifically the Blue Marble shaded relief and bathymetry layer served through Global Imagery Browse Services. It is a cloud free composite rather than a single day of observations, so you see the whole of Alberta at once instead of whatever cloud happened to be passing over it.

Fitting it to this map takes a step that most web maps skip. The imagery arrives in plate carree, where latitude and longitude are treated as a plain grid. This map is drawn in Lambert conformal conic. Laying one straight over the other would leave the coastline and the division boundaries drifting apart from each other as you move north, by kilometres rather than metres.

So the imagery is reprojected in your browser before it is drawn. Every pixel on the map is converted back to a latitude and longitude, and the matching pixel is read out of the source image. Both then sit in the same projection, which is why the imagery lines up with the boundaries. It is then clipped to the outline, so the map shows Alberta rather than a rectangle of the surrounding region.

The line where prairie farmland gives way to boreal forest runs across the middle of the province and is easy to see, as are the Rockies along the western edge.

The imagery is public domain. NASA asks to be credited rather than paid, and the credit is drawn onto the map itself so it travels with the image when you download it. That is also why this is NASA imagery rather than the sharper commercial layers you see on the big mapping sites. Those are licensed from private operators and cannot be redistributed through a download button.

Two practical notes. The imagery takes a second or two to appear the first time, because it is fetched and reprojected on the spot rather than served ready made. And at roughly five hundred metres per pixel it is a landscape view rather than a street view, so you can read terrain, forest cover and coastline, but not individual buildings.

A check you can repeat on paper

Take Division No. 6, the Calgary region.

Statistics Canada gives it 1,590,639 people and 12,613.51 square kilometres of land. Divide one by the other:

1,590,639 divided by 12,613.51 equals 126.1 people per square kilometre.

Select Division No. 6 and the Selection panel reads 126.1. Switch to imperial and it becomes 326.6 per square mile.

Now add the nineteen land areas in the table. They come to 634,658.27 square kilometres, which is the published provincial figure exactly. Add the nineteen populations and you get 4,262,635, which is also exact. Alberta's boundary file and the census agree to the square metre, which is not true of every province.

Mistakes that catch people out

Confusing a census division with a county. Rocky View County, Strathcona County and Foothills County are real municipalities with real councils, but none of them is a census division. They sit inside one.

Reading Lloydminster as a single city. It straddles the fourth meridian, which is the Alberta and Saskatchewan boundary, and it is the only city in Canada incorporated in two provinces. The 19,739 figure here is the Alberta side only. The full city is larger.

Reading Fort McMurray as a municipality. It is an urban service area inside the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo, which is the census subdivision the census actually reports. The figure shown here is Wood Buffalo's.

Treating the drawn area as land. The boundaries here enclose about four percent more than the census land area, and that difference is fresh water: Lake Athabasca, Lesser Slave Lake, Cold Lake and the rest. Every density on this page is computed on census land area, and the Selection panel shows both figures.

Expecting a smooth western edge. Alberta's border with British Columbia follows the continental divide through the Rockies from the international boundary up to 54 degrees north, then switches to the 120th meridian and runs dead straight to the Northwest Territories. That kink halfway up the province is real, not a drawing error.

Related Calculators and Reference

• Canada Map: the national view, with all thirteen provinces and territories and a link into each one that has its own map.
• British Columbia Regional District Map: the neighbour to the west, where twenty nine regional districts do have real powers.
• Quebec Census Division Map: ninety eight divisions and the most concentrated population in the country.
• Ontario Census Division Map: forty nine divisions, counties, districts and single tier cities.
• Nova Scotia County Map: eighteen counties traced from the real shoreline.
• New Brunswick County Map: fifteen counties from the official provincial boundary file.
• Statistics Canada Census Profile, 2021: the official source behind every population and land area figure on this page.

Boundaries and land area: Government of Alberta, Alberta Census Boundaries, adapted from Statistics Canada 2021 Census boundary files, under the Open Government Licence Alberta. Population: Statistics Canada, 2021 Census of Population, used under the Statistics Canada Open Licence. Rivers: Government of Alberta base water features. Neither agency endorses this product.