Newfoundland and Labrador 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 eleven census divisions so no two neighbours share a fill, Density shades them by people per square kilometre, Towns sizes the settlements above three thousand people, 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.

There is no rivers layer here. The generalised river dataset used elsewhere in this series does not carry Newfoundland and Labrador watercourses, and an empty layer would be worse than none.

Eleven divisions across two very different places

Newfoundland and Labrador's census divisions are statistical groupings with no councils behind them, officially named Division No. 1 through Division No. 11. Nine cover the island of Newfoundland and two cover Labrador on the mainland.

A map labelled Division No. 8 tells you nothing, so each division here carries the name of its largest town alongside the number. Division No. 1 is St. John's, No. 6 is Grand Falls-Windsor, No. 10 is Happy Valley-Goose Bay, No. 11 is Nain. The official name stays in the table and in the CSV export.

The split between island and mainland is the thing worth seeing. Labrador is 72 percent of the province's land area and holds 5.2 percent of its people. Division No. 11, the far north, runs at 0.035 people per square kilometre. Division No. 1 around St. John's runs at 29.9, which is roughly 850 times denser.

Satellite imagery, and how it is fitted to the map

The Satellite map type replaces the flat division colours with real imagery of Newfoundland and Labrador. 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 Newfoundland and Labrador 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 Newfoundland and Labrador rather than a rectangle of the surrounding region.

Labrador reads as boreal forest and barren ground, while the island shows the heavily indented coastline that makes its boundary file so large.

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. 1, the Avalon Peninsula around St. John's.

Statistics Canada gives it 271,878 people and 9,104.61 square kilometres of land. Divide one by the other:

271,878 divided by 9,104.61 equals 29.9 people per square kilometre.

Select Division No. 1 and the Selection panel reads 29.9. Switch to imperial and it becomes 77.4 per square mile.

Now add the eleven land areas in the table. They come to 358,170.37 square kilometres, which is the published provincial figure exactly. Add the populations and you get 510,550, also exact.

Mistakes that catch people out

Taking a division population from an encyclopedia infobox. Several of the pages describing these divisions still show 2016 figures in their summary boxes while the 2021 number sits further down the same page. Add the infobox values across all eleven and you get 515,612 instead of 510,550. The figures here are the 2021 census throughout, and they sum to the published provincial total.

Reading the drawn coastline as complete. This is one of the most island heavy coastlines in Canada, with more than nineteen thousand separate shapes in the full boundary file. Islands below five square kilometres are not drawn here, which removes most of that count and costs about a quarter of one percent of the area.

Expecting towns to sit exactly on the coast. Bonavista and Burin sit on narrow peninsulas that the simplified outline trims, so both were shifted about two kilometres to fall inside their division rather than in the sea beside it. At this scale the shift is smaller than the dot that marks them.

Treating the drawn area as land. The boundaries here enclose about thirteen percent more than the census land area, and that difference is fresh water. Labrador in particular holds the Smallwood Reservoir, one of the largest bodies of fresh water in the country. Every density on this page is computed on census land area, and the Selection panel shows both figures.

Assuming the Labrador boundary is settled. The line between Labrador and Quebec follows the 1927 decision of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, and Quebec has never formally accepted it. Maps published in Quebec sometimes draw it differently. The boundary used here is the census one.

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.
• Quebec Census Division Map: the neighbour across the disputed Labrador boundary.
• Nova Scotia County Map: eighteen counties traced from the real shoreline.
• 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.
• Nunavut Region Map: the other end of the density range, at 0.02 people per square kilometre.
• Statistics Canada Census Profile, 2021: the official source behind every figure on this page.

Boundaries and land area: Statistics Canada, 2021 Census cartographic boundary files. Population: Statistics Canada, 2021 Census of Population, used under the Statistics Canada Open Licence. Statistics Canada does not endorse this product.