Prince Edward Island County Map with Towns, Rivers and Density

How to use this map

Pick a map type along the top and the map redraws. Divisions colours the three counties, Density shades them by people per square kilometre, Cities sizes the four 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, so a blank outline with rivers on and boundaries off is two clicks away. Move the pointer across the map and the readout at the bottom left gives you latitude and longitude in degrees, minutes and seconds.

Why this map is traced from the coastline

The obvious way to build this page is to download the three county boundaries and draw them. That is what I tried first, and the result was wrong in a way worth explaining, because the same trap is waiting on every coastal province.

An administrative boundary is a statement about jurisdiction. It does not stop at the water. The mapped county boundaries for Prince Edward Island run out into the Gulf of St Lawrence and across the mouths of the bays, so the three of them enclose 7,153 square kilometres against a census land area of 5,681. That is 26 percent too much, and drawn on screen the island loses the deep inlets that give it its shape. Malpeque Bay, Bedeque Bay, Hillsborough Bay and Cardigan Bay all vanish under a smooth line.

So the outline here is not the boundary. It is the shoreline itself, 604 mapped coastline segments carrying 48,371 points, stitched into 91 closed rings with no loose ends anywhere. Those rings total 5,708.6 square kilometres, which is 0.4 percent above the census land area rather than 26 percent, and the small excess is inland ponds and the difference between one tidal datum and another.

The county lines then come from the administrative boundaries after all, because the internal divisions are exactly what those boundaries are good for. Cutting the shoreline against them produced three counties totalling 5,708.63 against the island's 5,708.60, so the split is clean: no overlaps, no slivers, nothing lost between them.

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 1101 for Kings, 1102 for Queens and 1103 for Prince.

The three populations add to 154,331 and the three land areas to 5,681.17 square kilometres, both matching the provincial totals exactly. That check is not decoration. Queens County is the one figure that is easy to get wrong, because it is often quoted as a total area of 2,020 square kilometres, which includes water. Its census land area is 1,987.32, and the two give densities of 44.4 and 45.2. The table here uses the land figure throughout.

The drawn outline is simplified from 48,371 points down to roughly a tenth of that. The cost is 0.04 percent of any county's area, which is far below the difference between the sources, and every island above a couple of hectares survives.

The projection

This map uses Lambert Conformal Conic with its two standard parallels placed one sixth of the way in from the north and south limits of the data, which for Prince Edward Island puts them at 46.13 and 46.87 degrees north. Every map in this series uses the same rule, so the projection is set by the province rather than typed in.

Small maps are faithful maps. Charlottetown to Summerside measures 53.65 kilometres by great circle and 53.65 kilometres off the projected coordinates, agreeing to better than one part in 65,000, or under a metre across the province. The national map of Canada, using the identical projection and the identical rule, manages only about one part in 390 between Toronto and Vancouver. Nothing is wrong with either one. Scale error on a conic grows with distance from the standard parallels, and Prince Edward Island is 120 kilometres from end to end.

Satellite imagery, and how it is fitted to the map

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

At island scale you can make out the farmland that covers most of the province and the deeply indented shape of the north shore.

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 Queens County, which holds the capital and more than half the province.

Statistics Canada gives it 89,770 people and 1,987.32 square kilometres of land. Density is one division:

89,770 divided by 1,987.32 equals 45.2 people per square kilometre.

Select Queens in the tool and the Selection panel reads 45.2. Switch to imperial and it becomes 117.0 per square mile, the same number multiplied by 2.58999.

Now do it the wrong way, using the mapped area of 2,034 square kilometres instead. You get 44.1, which is 2.3 percent low. Run the same mistake on Prince County and it goes the other way: its mapped area is smaller than its census land area, so the density comes out high instead. That is the tell that these two numbers are measuring different things rather than one being a worse version of the other.

One more you can verify without arithmetic: add the three county populations. They come to 154,331. If your total differs, you have picked up a municipality instead of a county somewhere.

Mistakes that catch people out

Using the 2016 land area by accident. Prince Edward Island was 5,686.03 square kilometres in the 2016 census and is 5,681.18 in 2021. The two figures sit side by side in search results with nothing to tell them apart, and the older one is still quoted widely. It is a difference of five square kilometres, which sounds like nothing until you are adding thirteen provinces together and your national total refuses to reconcile.

Reading a county total area as its land area. Queens is quoted at 2,020 square kilometres in plenty of places. That includes water, and dividing by it understates the density by about two percent.

Expecting an administrative boundary to follow the beach. It does not, here or anywhere else with a coast. If you are computing area from a boundary file, check the total against the published land area before you trust a single county.

Treating the rivers as hydrography. They are the named courses only, generalised for orientation. Many of the wide inlets that look like rivers on the island are tidal, and they already appear as coastline rather than as a river line.

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 page and on the national map. Prince Edward Island is the densest province in Canada at 27.2 people per square kilometre, and it still sits in the same band as places you would not think of as crowded.

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 neighbouring province, fifteen counties, and the same boundary against land area comparison on a much larger canvas.
• 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, and the island tops out at 140 metres, so bring your own elevation points if you need relief.
• Outcrop Photo Annotator: for adding a scale bar and north arrow to field photographs of those red sandstone cliffs.
• 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.