The Department of Natural Resources, operating under the FIP applied title Natural Resources Canada (NRCan), is the ministry of the government of Canada responsible for natural resources, energy, minerals and metals, forests, earth sciences, mapping and remote sensing. It was created in 1995 by amalgamating the now-defunct Departments of Energy, Mines and Resources and Forestry. Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) works to ensure the responsible development of Canada's natural resources, including energy, forests, minerals and metals. NRCan also uses its expertise in earth sciences to build and maintain an up-to-date knowledge base of our landmass and resources. To promote internal collaboration, NRCan has implemented a departmental wide wiki based on MediaWiki. Natural Resources Canada also collaborates with American and Mexican government scientists, along with the Commission for Environmental Cooperation, to produce the North American Environmental Atlas, which is used to depict and track environmental issues for a continental perspective.
The Atlas of Canada is an online atlas published by Natural Resources Canada that has information on every city, town, village, and hamlet in Canada. It was originally a print atlas, with its first edition being published in 1906 by geographer James White and a team of 20 cartographers. Much of the geospatial data used in the atlas is available for download and commercial re-use from the Atlas of Canada site or from GeoGratis. Information used to develop the atlas is used in conjunction with information from Mexico and the United States to produce collaborative continental-scale tools such as the North American Environmental Atlas.
