Satellite Imagery
Free, medium to high resolution satellite scenes are available for most of the planet within 24 hours of acquisition. TMU users typically start with USGS EarthExplorer for the Landsat archive (30 m, 1984–present) and Sentinel-2 MSI imagery from the Copernicus program (10 m, 2015–present), both discoverable by drawing a search box, picking a date range, and downloading surface reflectance GeoTIFFs. NASA’s Earthdata Search and Worldview portals add global near real time layers, including the Harmonized Landsat–Sentinel (HLS) product for ready to map analysis.
Aerial Photography
For high resolution imagery, consult the Scholars GeoPortal. For high resolution snapshots before and beyond the satellite era, start with the National Air Photo Library (NAPL) via NRCan’s EODMS, which indexes six million frames covering all of Canada back to the 1920s.
LiDAR
LiDAR delivers centimetre level elevation detail for surface modeling, flood analysis, and tree height studies. The Ontario GeoHub provides open Digital Terrain Models (bare earth), Digital Surface Models (first return), and classified point cloud LAS files for large parts of the province, while Natural Resources Canada hosts national point cloud tiles. Download the tiles you need, merge them in ArcGIS Pro or QGIS, and generate slope, aspect, or canopy height layers in minutes.