Yukon Subdivision Map with Population and Density

How to use this map

Pick a map type along the top and the map redraws. Subdivisions colours the thirty five census subdivisions so no two neighbours share a fill, Density shades them by people per square kilometre, and Satellite swaps the flat colours for real satellite imagery, and Blank outline gives you black on white for printing. Click any subdivision, 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. Most of Yukon's subdivisions are small enough that you will want to zoom in to see them at all.

Why this map is not a census division map

Every other map in this series divides a province or territory into its census divisions. Yukon has exactly one. The whole territory, all 472,345 square kilometres of it, is a single census division, so a division map would be one polygon in one colour with nothing to compare.

This map goes one level down instead, to census subdivisions. These are the municipalities and their equivalents: one city, three towns, four villages, two hamlets, thirteen settlements, several self-governing First Nation areas, and five unorganized areas that cover everything else.

That makes Yukon the odd one out in the suite, and the geography is why. It has more land than Sweden and fewer people than a mid sized town.

One city, and then everything else

Whitehorse holds 28,201 people, which is 70.1 percent of Yukon, on 413.94 square kilometres, which is 0.09 percent of its land. Its density is 68.1 people per square kilometre.

The second largest subdivision is Dawson at 1,577. Nothing else reaches 1,600. Twenty of the thirty five subdivisions hold 1,433 people between them, and four of them recorded nobody at all in 2021: Kloo Lake, Moosehide Creek 2, North Slope and the Teslin land parcel.

At the other extreme, the subdivision called Yukon, Unorganized is 445,270 square kilometres, which is 94 percent of the territory. It holds 1,496 people, giving it a density of 0.003 per square kilometre. That is the lowest figure anywhere in this series, lower than anything in Nunavut.

Satellite imagery, and how it is fitted to the map

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

The mountain ranges and the river valleys between them stand out clearly, which is useful on a map where most subdivisions are too small to see without zooming.

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 Whitehorse.

Statistics Canada gives it 28,201 people and 413.94 square kilometres of land. Divide one by the other:

28,201 divided by 413.94 equals 68.1 people per square kilometre.

Select Whitehorse and the Selection panel reads 68.1, which is also the figure Statistics Canada publishes for the city. Add the thirty five land areas in the table and they come to 472,345.44, the published territorial figure. Add the thirty five populations and you get 40,232, also exact.

Mistakes that catch people out

Confusing the three Teslins. There are three separate census subdivisions with Teslin in the name, and they are genuinely different places with different counts: Teslin the village has 239 people on 3.77 square kilometres, Teslin Post 13 is a self-governing area with 19 people on 1.17, and the Teslin land parcel has none on 25.93. Any source that gives all three the same number has merged them.

Reading a zero as missing data. Four subdivisions genuinely recorded no residents in 2021. Their density is zero, not unknown.

Expecting the unorganized areas to be empty. They are not. Macpherson-Grizzly Valley holds 1,540 people, more than Dawson, and Marsh Lake holds 746. These are rural residential areas around Whitehorse, not wilderness.

Treating the drawn area as land. The outlines here enclose slightly more than the census land area because they include inland water. Every density on this page is computed on census land area, and the Selection panel shows both figures.

Comparing this map directly with the others in the series. A census subdivision is a municipality. A census division is a group of them. Whitehorse at 68.1 per square kilometre is a city figure, and it belongs beside other cities rather than beside a census division average.

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.
• Northwest Territories Region Map: the neighbour to the east, with six numbered census divisions.
• Nunavut Region Map: three named regions across the Arctic.
• British Columbia Regional District Map: the neighbour to the south, with twenty nine regional districts.
• 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, land area and population: Statistics Canada, 2021 Census of Population and 2021 Census cartographic boundary files, used under the Statistics Canada Open Licence. Statistics Canada does not endorse this product.