About Ice Fish Canada

Ice Fish Canada is an independent project based in Okotoks, Alberta. It gives anglers one page per named Canadian lake (135,794 lakes) with the facts that help you pick where to fish: size, nearest town, fish species where known, a summary of the fishing rules and ice reports from anglers.

Where does the lake data come from?

• Lake names and locations: the Canadian Geographical Names Data Base, Natural Resources Canada (Open Government Licence, Canada).
• Lake size: HydroLAKES lake polygons (Messager et al. 2016, CC BY 4.0). We match each lake's location to the polygon that contains it, so a lake with no matching polygon shows no size.
• Nearest town and city: GeoNames populated places (CC BY 4.0). Distances are straight-line, not driving distances. A town is a place with at least 250 people, a city at least 25,000.
• Fish in British Columbia lakes: the Government of British Columbia's Known BC Fish Observations (Open Government Licence, British Columbia). These are recorded sightings, so a species can be present without being listed.
• Fish in Manitoba and Nova Scotia lakes: Government of Manitoba waterbody and stocking records (OpenMB Information and Data Use Licence) and Nova Scotia fish species and hatchery stocking records (Open Government Licence – Nova Scotia).
• Fish in Ontario lakes: the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources fish stocking data (Open Government Licence, Ontario). These list what the province has stocked in the past 10 years, not every species in the lake, and we label them as stocked.
• Fish in hand-researched lakes: species we have recorded by hand for popular lakes.
• Regulations: summaries of provincial guides, each with a link to the official source.
• Ice reports: first-hand reports from anglers, and published conditions, each shown with its source and date.

What can't the site tell you?

It cannot tell you the ice is safe. Ice thickness varies across a lake and changes daily, so measure it yourself. Regulation summaries can be out of date or incomplete, and the official provincial guide is the law. Many lakes have no fish record because no open data exists for them yet.

How often does it change?

Ice reports and catches appear as anglers file them. Lake facts are rebuilt from the sources above when those sources are updated. Each lake page shows the date it was last updated.

Which lakes are listed for search engines?

Every lake is reachable on the site. Search engines are asked to index lakes where we have something specific to show: hand-researched lakes and lakes with a fish record. The rest are left out of the sitemap and marked noindex until they have more than a name, a size and a distance.

Contact

For corrections to a lake's facts, use the discussion on that lake's page.

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