Northwest Territories Region Map with Population and Density

How to use this map

Pick a map type along the top and the map redraws. Regions colours the six census divisions so no two neighbours share a fill, Density shades them by people per square kilometre, Communities sizes the twenty six settlements above two hundred people, and Satellite swaps the flat colours for real satellite imagery, and Blank outline gives you black on white for printing. Click any region, 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 Northwest Territories watercourses, and an empty layer would be worse than none.

Why these regions have no names

The six census divisions of the Northwest Territories are called Region 1 through Region 6, and that is their whole official name. They were introduced for the 2011 census, replacing the two divisions used before, which were called Inuvik Region and Fort Smith Region.

This is the only jurisdiction in Canada where the census divisions have neither names nor numbers that map onto something people use. Alberta and Saskatchewan number theirs too, but there the numbers are at least the familiar way of referring to them. Here the numbering exists only inside census tables.

They are also not the territory's administrative regions. The Northwest Territories does have named regions used for government services, including Beaufort Delta, Sahtu, Dehcho, Tlicho, South Slave and North Slave, and the census divisions are broadly similar in extent. They are not the same thing though, and the encyclopedia entry for each census division opens by warning against confusing the two.

A map labelled Region 4 tells you nothing, so each region here carries the name of its largest community alongside the number: Region 6 is Yellowknife, Region 5 is Hay River, Region 1 is Inuvik, Region 4 is Fort Simpson, Region 2 is Norman Wells, Region 3 is Behchokǫ̀. The official name stays in the table and in the CSV export.

One city and a great deal of space

The Northwest Territories has 41,070 people spread across 1,127,712 square kilometres, which averages 0.04 per square kilometre.

Region 6 contains Yellowknife and holds 20,805 people, just over half the territory, on 16 percent of the land. Region 2, around Norman Wells, is larger at 19 percent of the land and holds 2,259 people, which is 5.5 percent. Its density is 0.010 per square kilometre, the lowest of the six.

Yellowknife alone is 20,340 people, meaning the city holds 49.5 percent of the territory's population and almost the whole of Region 6.

Satellite imagery, and how it is fitted to the map

The Satellite map type replaces the flat region colours with real imagery of the Northwest Territories. 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 the Northwest Territories 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 region 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 the Northwest Territories rather than a rectangle of the surrounding region.

Great Bear Lake and Great Slave Lake dominate the imagery, and the treeline is visible as the point where the dark forest gives way to pale tundra.

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 Region 6, which contains Yellowknife.

Statistics Canada gives it 20,805 people and 182,201.90 square kilometres of land. Divide one by the other:

20,805 divided by 182,201.90 equals 0.114 people per square kilometre.

Select Region 6 and the Selection panel reads 0.114. Add the six land areas in the table and they come to 1,127,711.92, which is the published territorial figure. Add the six populations and you get 41,070, also exact.

Mistakes that catch people out

Treating a census division as an administrative region. Sahtu and Dehcho are real regions with real offices. Region 2 and Region 4 are census constructs that happen to cover similar ground. Figures published for one will not always match the other.

Expecting one decimal place to be enough. Every region here falls below 0.2 people per square kilometre, so all six would read the same at the usual precision. The figures on this page carry three decimals instead, which is the only way to tell Region 2 at 0.010 from Region 6 at 0.114.

Treating the drawn area as land. The boundaries here enclose about seventeen percent more than the census land area, and that difference is fresh water. Great Bear Lake and Great Slave Lake are the two largest lakes entirely within Canada, and both are here.

Expecting communities to sit exactly on the coast. Tuktoyaktuk and Ulukhaktok were each shifted about three kilometres so they fall inside the simplified outline rather than in the Beaufort Sea beside it. At this scale the shift is smaller than the dot that marks them.

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.
• Nunavut Region Map: the neighbour to the east, and the only place in Canada emptier than this one.
• Alberta Census Division Map: the neighbour to the south, which also numbers its divisions.
• British Columbia Regional District Map: twenty nine regional districts with real powers.
• Saskatchewan Census Division Map: eighteen numbered divisions and a very empty north of its own.
• 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.