Regional and Community Vitality Index

The RVI/CVI database is derived from the CanEcumene 3.0 GDB (Eddy, et. al. 2023) using a selection of socio-economic variables identified in Eddy and Dort (2011) that aim to capture the overall state of socio-economic conditions of communities as ‘human habitats’. This dataset was developed primarily for application in mapping socio-economic conditions of communities and regions for environmental and natural resource management, climate change adaptation, Impact Assessments (IAs) and Regional Assessments (RAs), and Cumulative Effects Assessment (CEA).

The RVI/CVI is comprised of five sub-indicators: 1) population change, 2) age structure, 3) education levels, 4) employment levels, and 5) real estate values. Index values are based on percentile ranks of each sub-indicator, and averaged for each community, and for three ranked groups: 1) all of Canada, 2) by province, and 3) by population size. The data covers the Census periods of 2001, 2006, 2011 (NHS), 2016, and 2021.

The index is mapped in two ways: 1) as ‘points’ for individual communities (CVI), and 2) as ‘rasters’ for spatial interpolation of point data (RVI). These formats provide an alternative spatial framework to conventional StatsCan CSD framework. (For more information on this approach see Eddy, et. al. 2020).

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Eddy, B.G., Muggridge, M., LeBlanc, R., Osmond, J., Kean, C., and Boyd, E. 2023. The CanEcumene 3.0 GIS Database. Federal Geospatial Platform (FGP), Natural Resources Canada. https://gcgeo.gc.ca/viz/index-en.html?keys=draft-3f599fcb-8d77-4dbb-8b1e-d3f27f932a4b

Eddy B.G., Muggridge M, LeBlanc R, Osmond J, Kean C, Boyd E. 2020. An Ecological Approach for Mapping Socio-Economic Data in Support of Ecosystems Analysis: Examples in Mapping Canada’s Forest Ecumene. One Ecosystem 5: e55881. https://doi.org/10.3897/oneeco.5.e55881

Eddy, B.G.; Dort, A. 2011. Integrating Socio-Economic Data for Integrated Land Management (ILM): Examples from the Humber River Basin, western Newfoundland. Geomatica, Vol. 65, No. 3, p. 283-291. doi:10.5623/cig2011-044.