Nunavut 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 three regions so no two neighbours share a fill, Density shades them by people per square kilometre, Communities sizes the fourteen settlements above eight 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 on this map. Nunavut's watercourses are not carried in the generalised river dataset used elsewhere in this series, and an empty layer would be worse than none.

Three regions, not eighteen divisions

Nunavut has three census divisions and they have real names: Qikiqtaaluk, which is the Baffin region and the eastern Arctic islands, Kivalliq on the western shore of Hudson Bay, and Kitikmeot in the central Arctic. They correspond to the territory's administrative regions, which is unusual among the numbered census divisions of the prairies.

Qikiqtaaluk is the largest at 970,555 square kilometres, which on its own would be the third largest province or territory in Canada, ahead of British Columbia. Kivalliq and Kitikmeot are close to each other in size at around 434,000 and 432,000.

The emptiest place in Canada

Nunavut covers 1,836,994 square kilometres of land, which is 20.9 percent of Canada. It holds 36,858 people, which is 0.10 percent of the country. That works out to about 0.02 people per square kilometre.

Numbers at that scale break the usual way of writing density. Every other map in this series can show one decimal place and say something useful. Here all three regions would read 0.0, so the figures on this page carry three decimals instead: Kivalliq at 0.025, Qikiqtaaluk at 0.020, Kitikmeot at 0.015.

For comparison, the City of Winnipeg runs at 1,324 people per square kilometre. Kivalliq would need to be about fifty three thousand times more crowded to match it.

Satellite imagery, and how it is fitted to the map

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

Most of Nunavut reads as ice and snow. That is why the region boundaries are drawn as a white line over a dark halo, so they stay visible against a pale background as well as a dark one.

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 Qikiqtaaluk, the Baffin region.

Statistics Canada gives it 19,355 people and 970,554.84 square kilometres of land. Divide one by the other:

19,355 divided by 970,554.84 equals 0.020 people per square kilometre.

Select Qikiqtaaluk and the Selection panel reads 0.020. Add the three land areas in the table and they come to 1,836,993.78, which is the published territorial figure. Add the three populations and you get 36,858, also exact.

Mistakes that catch people out

Reading the drawn coastline as complete. Nunavut has thousands of islands, and drawing every one at web scale would produce a file nobody could load. Islands below one hundred square kilometres are not drawn here. That removes more than sixty two thousand separate shapes and costs less than one percent of the total area, but it does mean small islands you know are missing.

Treating the drawn area as land. The outlines here enclose about thirteen percent more than the census land area, and that difference is fresh water. Nunavut has a great deal of it, including Nettilling and Amadjuak lakes on Baffin Island, both larger than Prince Edward Island.

Expecting communities to sit exactly on the coast. Two of the fourteen, Pond Inlet and Kinngait, had to be shifted a few kilometres inland so they fall inside the simplified outline rather than in the sea beside it. At this scale the shift is smaller than the dot that marks them.

Assuming the community list is the whole population. The fourteen settlements shown here hold about seventy five percent of the territory. The rest live in smaller hamlets below the display threshold.

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.
• Manitoba Census Division Map: the neighbour to the south, and the densest single division in the west.
• Quebec Census Division Map: ninety eight divisions across the other side of Hudson Bay.
• Saskatchewan Census Division Map: eighteen numbered divisions and a very empty north of its own.
• Alberta Census Division Map: nineteen divisions split between two cities.
• 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.