British Columbia Regional District Map with Cities, Rivers and Density

How to use this map

Pick a map type along the top and the map redraws. Divisions colours the twenty nine regional districts so no two neighbours share a fill, Density shades them by people per square kilometre, Cities sizes the twenty nine population centres, Rivers draws the major watercourses, and Satellite swaps the flat colours for real satellite imagery, and Blank outline gives you black on white for printing. Click any district, or any row in the table, and its figures appear in the Selection panel.

The layer switches on the right stay independent of the map type. District names shrink automatically where the districts crowd together in the southwest, so Metro Vancouver and Capital stay labelled without the names colliding. Move the pointer across the map and the readout at the bottom left gives you latitude and longitude in degrees, minutes and seconds.

Why the boundaries had to be cut back to the land

British Columbia publishes its regional district boundaries, and they are excellent. They are also legal boundaries, which means that on the coast they carry on out over the water. That is correct as law and wrong as a map.

The size of it surprised me. Taken as published, the twenty nine districts enclose 1,035,174 square kilometres against a census land area of 920,685. North Coast Regional District is 69 percent water. Capital, which is Victoria and the southern tip of Vancouver Island, is 51 percent water, because its boundary reaches out across the Strait of Juan de Fuca to the American line. Draw those as they come and you have not drawn British Columbia, you have drawn British Columbia plus a great deal of the Pacific.

So every district here is cut against the province's own land polygons. After the cut the same twenty nine total 943,112 square kilometres, and Capital drops from 4,854 to 2,370 against a census land area of 2,338. The interior districts, which have no coast, are untouched: Cariboo is 82,758 either way.

Where the geometry comes from

Both halves come from the BC Data Catalogue, which is the same kind of authoritative provincial source that the New Brunswick page uses. The district boundaries are the legal administrative set. The land is the 1 to 125,000 coastline series, which arrives as separate polygons for every landmass.

Eleven of those polygons are the mainland, Vancouver Island, Graham Island and Moresby Island. The rest are islands, and there are thousands. This map keeps the 356 that are larger than one square kilometre, which sounds ruthless until you look at what it costs: those 356 carry 18,472 square kilometres of the 18,900 that all the islands hold between them. The 5,788 left out are rocks that would not survive the drawing at this scale anyway.

The check that convinced me the land was right: mainland plus islands comes to 944,631 square kilometres, and the published total area of British Columbia is 944,735. That is agreement to eleven parts in a hundred thousand. The gap between that and the census land figure of 920,685 is fresh water, which is the same lake effect the Nova Scotia page runs into, and it is why every density here is computed on census land area rather than on the shape you can see.

Population and land area are Statistics Canada, 2021 Census of Population, joined on the census division identifiers 5901 through 5959. The twenty nine populations add to 5,000,879 and the land areas to 920,685 against a published 920,686.55. Both match.

Regional districts really are the census divisions

This is worth saying because it is not true everywhere. In British Columbia the regional districts are the census divisions, one for one, with Stikine Region standing in for the part of the northwest that never joined one. Twenty eight regional districts plus Stikine gives twenty nine.

Go east and that stops being the case. Saskatchewan has 297 rural municipalities and its eighteen census divisions are pure statistics, drawn by Statistics Canada and governed by nobody. The same is true in Newfoundland and Labrador. If you are looking for a boundary file for those provinces you will not find the divisions in the usual places, because in a real sense they are not administrative objects at all.

The projection

Lambert Conformal Conic, with the two standard parallels placed one sixth of the way in from the north and south limits of the data, which for British Columbia puts them near 50.3 and 58.1 degrees north. Every map in this series uses the same rule.

Vancouver to Prince George measures 516.0 kilometres by great circle and 515.4 by the projected coordinates, an agreement of about one part in 960. That is a good deal looser than the 1 in 4,556 that Nova Scotia manages, and much tighter than the 1 in 390 on the national map. Scale error on a conic grows with distance from the standard parallels, and British Columbia is 1,200 kilometres across. Use the map to see where things are, not to measure how far apart they are.

Satellite imagery, and how it is fitted to the map

The Satellite map type replaces the flat regional district colours with real imagery of British Columbia. 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 British Columbia 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 regional district 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 British Columbia rather than a rectangle of the surrounding region.

The Coast Mountains, the interior plateau and the Rockies separate clearly, and the fjords along the coast are easy to pick out.

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

British Columbia holds the widest density spread of any province, and the two ends make the point better than any average.

Metro Vancouver has 2,642,825 people on 2,879 square kilometres of land. Divide and you get 918.0 people per square kilometre. Stikine Region has 683 people on 118,409 square kilometres, which comes to 0.006 per square kilometre.

Divide the first by the second. Metro Vancouver is roughly 159,000 times more densely settled than Stikine Region. They are in the same province, counted the same way, in the same census. Select each in the tool and the Selection panel gives you the same two numbers.

Now do it the wrong way, on the drawn area rather than the census land area. Capital comes out at 175.9 instead of 177.7, which looks harmless. Try the same on North Coast and the error is not harmless at all, because two thirds of what you divided by was ocean.

Mistakes that catch people out

Computing area from an official boundary file and calling it land. Official does not mean terrestrial. On this coast it can mean two thirds sea, and the error is largest exactly where the coastline is most complicated.

Assuming a coastline dataset is all coastline. The BC series mixes land polygons, water polygons and islands under different feature codes in the same layer. Take it whole and you get 1,583,488 square kilometres, which is 72 percent more than the province. The feature code is doing the work, not the layer name.

Reading Metro Vancouver as the city. The regional district runs from Bowen Island to Langley and holds 2,642,825 people, well over half the province. The city of Vancouver is a fraction of that.

Treating the rivers as hydrography. They are the major named courses, trimmed to the province and generalised for display. The Liard, the Peace and the Teslin all continue past the provincial line, and they are cut here rather than drawn into Yukon.

Comparing densities between provinces using quantile shading. The bands here are fixed rather than quantile, so a colour means the same number on this page and on every other map in the series.

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.
• Nova Scotia County Map: eighteen counties traced from the shoreline, and the clearest version of the lakes against land area problem.
• New Brunswick County Map: fifteen counties from the official provincial boundary file.
• Prince Edward Island County Map: three counties, and the tightest agreement in the series between drawn area and census land.
• Coordinate Converter, latitude and longitude to UTM: this map reads out in degrees, minutes and seconds, so go here when you need a UTM grid reference instead.
• GPS Waypoint Logger: collect points in the field, then bring the CSV back and check which district they fall in.
• Contour Map Generator from XYZ data: this page has no terrain layer, which in British Columbia is a real omission, so bring your own elevation points.
• Statistics Canada Census Profile, 2021: the official source for every population and land area figure on this page.

Regional district boundaries and coastline polygons: Province of British Columbia, BC Data Catalogue, used under the Open Government Licence British Columbia. Population and land area: Statistics Canada, 2021 Census of Population, used under the Statistics Canada Open Licence. Rivers: Natural Earth, public domain. Neither source endorses this product.