Nova Scotia County Map with Towns, Rivers and Population Density

How to use this map

Pick a map type along the top and the map redraws. Divisions colours the eighteen counties so no two neighbours share a fill, Density shades them by people per square kilometre, Cities sizes the twenty population centres, Rivers draws the named watercourses, and Satellite swaps the flat colours for real satellite imagery, and Blank outline gives you black on white for printing. Click any county, 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. Choosing a type sets a sensible starting combination, but every switch still works afterwards. 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 outline is the shoreline, not the boundary

County boundaries are statements about jurisdiction, and they do not stop at the water. Taken at face value the eighteen mapped county boundaries for Nova Scotia enclose 65,906 square kilometres against a census land area of 52,825. That is a quarter too much, and drawn on screen it turns the province into a smooth blob with the bays filled in.

So the outline here is the shoreline: 8,683 mapped coastline segments carrying 378,314 points. Those stitch into 3,365 closed rings, which is Nova Scotia in one number, because almost all of them are islands. The county lines are then cut from the administrative boundaries, which is the job those boundaries are actually good for.

One ring refused to close, and the reason is worth knowing if you ever do this yourself. Nova Scotia is not an island. Its mainland shoreline runs out of the province and into New Brunswick at the Chignecto Isthmus, so the coastline arrives as an open line with its two ends 24.4 kilometres apart, one on the Northumberland Strait and one on the Cumberland Basin. Closing that gap with a straight line would have shaved off whatever Nova Scotia land sits west of the chord. The fix is to close it deliberately too far, out into New Brunswick, and then let Cumberland County's own boundary cut it back to the right place.

The lakes, and why the mapped area runs high

A shoreline encloses everything inside it, including the fresh water. Nova Scotia has a great deal of fresh water. The eighteen counties as drawn here total 55,283 square kilometres against 52,825 of census land, a difference of about 2,460 square kilometres, and that difference is lakes.

It is not spread evenly, which is what makes it interesting. Sort the counties by the gap and you have drawn a geological map without meaning to. Queens comes first at 15.7 percent, Yarmouth second at 10.0, Halifax third at 8.1. These are the counties sitting on the Southern Upland, the granite and slate country behind the South Shore where the ice left thousands of lakes and almost no soil. Lake Rossignol alone, in Queens, covers close to 380 square kilometres. At the other end, Antigonish and Colchester come in under one percent, because they are farmland on softer rock.

Every density on this page is computed on census land area, never on the mapped area, because the mapped area would quietly reward a county for having lakes in it. The Selection panel shows both numbers side by side so you can see the size of the effect for yourself.

Where the numbers come from

Geometry is OpenStreetMap. Population and land area are Statistics Canada, 2021 Census of Population, joined on the census division identifiers 1201 through 1218, which run Shelburne, Yarmouth, Digby, Queens, Annapolis, Lunenburg, Kings, Hants, Halifax, Colchester, Cumberland, Pictou, Guysborough, Antigonish, Inverness, Richmond, Cape Breton and Victoria.

The eighteen populations add to 969,383 and the eighteen land areas to 52,824.70 square kilometres, against a published provincial total of 52,824.71. Both match, and that is the check worth doing before you trust any single county.

The drawn outline is simplified from 378,314 points to about 8,500, which costs at most 0.31 percent of any county's area. Every island above ten square kilometres survives the cut, and so does Sable Island, 160 kilometres out in the Atlantic and, administratively, part of Halifax County. Select Halifax and you will see it highlight along with the mainland.

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. For Nova Scotia that puts them near 44.0 and 46.6 degrees north. Every map in this series uses the same rule, so the projection follows the province rather than being typed in.

Halifax to Sydney measures 312.51 kilometres by great circle and 312.44 by the projected coordinates, an agreement of one part in 4,556, or about 70 metres over 312 kilometres. That is roughly the same fidelity as the New Brunswick map and far better than the national map of Canada manages at one part in 390, for the simple reason that scale error on a conic grows with distance from the standard parallels and Nova Scotia is a small province.

Satellite imagery, and how it is fitted to the map

The Satellite map type replaces the flat county colours with real imagery of Nova Scotia. 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 Nova Scotia 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 county 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 Nova Scotia rather than a rectangle of the surrounding region.

The Bay of Fundy and the Atlantic coast read very differently in the bathymetry, and Cape Breton is clearly separated from the mainland.

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 Halifax County, which holds 45 percent of the province.

Statistics Canada gives it 440,072 people and 5,477.53 square kilometres of land. Density is one division:

440,072 divided by 5,477.53 equals 80.3 people per square kilometre.

Select Halifax and the Selection panel reads 80.3. Switch to imperial and it becomes 208.1 per square mile, the same number multiplied by 2.58999.

Now do it the wrong way, on the mapped area of 5,919 square kilometres. You get 74.4, which is 7.4 percent low. Run the same mistake on Queens County and 4.4 becomes 3.8, an error of 13.6 percent, because Queens is a third lake by comparison. That is why the denominator matters, and why the error is worst exactly where you would least expect a problem.

One more you can verify without arithmetic: add the eighteen county populations. They come to 969,383.

Mistakes that catch people out

Computing area from a boundary file and calling it land. Do that here and you are 25 percent high before you start. Always total your counties and compare against the published provincial land area.

Assuming a coastline dataset closes into polygons. It does not, wherever the coast crosses a provincial line. Nova Scotia has exactly one such place and it is the isthmus, so exactly one ring comes back open. If your stitcher reports several open lines, the more likely explanation is that it only joins segments end to start and cannot prepend.

Reading Halifax County as the city. The county is the Halifax Regional Municipality and it runs from Ecum Secum to Hubbards, plus Sable Island. The population centre of Halifax is 348,634 of the county's 440,072.

Treating the rivers as hydrography. They are named courses over eighteen kilometres, generalised for display. For anything that needs real hydrography, go to the provincial water resource layers.

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, on the New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island pages, and on the national map.

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.
• New Brunswick County Map: the neighbour across the isthmus, fifteen counties, built from the official provincial boundary file rather than the shoreline.
• Prince Edward Island County Map: three counties, and the same shoreline method on a province with almost no lakes, so the mapped area lands within half a percent of the land area.
• Coordinate Converter, latitude and longitude to UTM: this map reads out in degrees, minutes and seconds, so go here when you need the same position as a UTM grid reference.
• GPS Waypoint Logger: collect points in the field, then bring the CSV back and check which county they fall in.
• Contour Map Generator from XYZ data: this page has no terrain layer, so use this when you have your own elevation points to contour.
• Statistics Canada Census Profile, 2021: the official source for every population and land area figure on this page.

Coastline, county boundaries and rivers: OpenStreetMap contributors, under the Open Database Licence. Population and land area: Statistics Canada, 2021 Census of Population, used under the Statistics Canada Open Licence. Neither source endorses this product.