About New Brunswick Crown Land

New Brunswick Crown Land is an independent map of public land in New Brunswick. It answers a question that comes up constantly in a province where half the forest is private: is the woods road I'm looking at on Crown land, freehold, a park or a protected area, and what can I do there? This page explains who makes the map, where its data comes from, and where its limits are.

Who is behind the site

The site is run by a small independent team in Canada. It grew out of a public-land map we first built for Quebec; New Brunswick, with its patchwork of Crown and freehold forest, was a natural next step. Nobody here works for the provincial government. The site has no connection to the Department of Natural Resources, NB Parks or Parks Canada, and no forest company, outfitter or tourism agency pays for or reviews what we publish.

Using the map costs nothing. Advertising keeps the lights on, along with optional geo-referenced PDF downloads for people who want an offline copy of an area in their GPS app.

Where the New Brunswick data comes from

New Brunswick is one of the few provinces that publishes its Crown land parcels as open data, so on this map Crown land is drawn rather than guessed. All the shaded layers come from the Province of New Brunswick through GeoNB and the Department of Natural Resources' open data services. We don't draw any boundaries by hand.

• Crown land (yellow): about 10,000 parcels from the department's Crown land layer, from blocks of forest covering hundreds of thousands of hectares in the north to small lots of a few hectares. The layer records ownership only, not how a parcel is used or leased.
• Provincial parks (purple): 24 park and heritage-site boundaries, from Mount Carleton at about 17,300 hectares to roadside sites of less than a hectare.
• Protected Natural Areas (green): about 200 areas designated under the Protected Natural Areas Act, six of them Class I and the rest Class II.
• Conserved areas (teal): about 550 Nature Legacy areas on Crown land, protected by conservation easement.
• Lakes and rivers: the fishing directory's 5,180 lakes, rivers and brooks come from the Canadian Geographical Names Database, so they're official names and locations, not field reports.
• Campground listings: compiled from OpenStreetMap (© OpenStreetMap contributors) and grouped by New Brunswick's scenic drives.

None of it is live. We download the provincial layers and refresh them from time to time, so a new protected area, a parcel sale or a park boundary change may not show yet. When an official source and our map disagree, the source wins.

What the map can and cannot tell you

Because Crown land is drawn, the unshaded part of the New Brunswick map is mostly private: woodlots, farms, cottage lots and the freehold forest owned by forest companies. That's the reverse of most public-land maps, where Crown land is the blank background, and it has three consequences.

First, yellow means public, not open for everything. Crown land includes leased camp lots, agricultural and blueberry leases, gravel pits and land around government buildings, and our layer doesn't separate them out. A posted sign, a fence or a field of crops on the ground outranks the colour on the map. Reserves and national parks aren't provincial Crown land at all and have their own rules.

Second, unshaded doesn't mean closed. Industrial freehold is private land, but many companies let the public use their roads and woods under conditions they set, and some post their land or gate their roads. Private woodlot owners can post their land against hunting or vehicles. The how to find Crown land guide explains the posting colours and who to ask.

Third, conditions aren't on the map. Daily burn restrictions, woods closures during fire season, washed-out roads, gates and seasonal closures change week to week.

How people in New Brunswick use it

• Finding a weekend camp near the city. A family in Moncton looking for a tent site within an hour zooms out from the city until the yellow Crown land starts, picks a few parcels with a road and a brook, then reads the camping rules before choosing one. The Crown land near Moncton page is a good start.
• Checking a hunting area. A hunter from Fredericton looks up the Protected Natural Areas, provincial parks and refuges in a Wildlife Management Zone to see what's closed, then reads the hunting on Crown land guide and the provincial Hunt and Trap summary.
• Planning a coastal trip. Someone driving the Fundy coast uses the Saint John to Fundy Trail Parkway road trip and the campground listings to line up nights, and learns that Fundy National Park needs a Parks Canada permit to fish.
• Picking a lake. An angler in Bathurst browses the lakes and rivers directory, checks on the map whether a lake sits on Crown land, and reads the fishing licence and rules guide to see whether it's fly-fishing-only water.

Corrections and feedback

Spotted a parcel that's drawn in the wrong place, a campground that no longer exists, a misspelled brook or a road that's now gated? Send it through the contact page with the location (a route number, the name of the woods road or a pair of coordinates) and what you found. Every message is read, and anything we can confirm against provincial data gets fixed. We can't rule on whether a particular parcel is open for camping or hunting; for that, call the Crown Lands Branch or the nearest Natural Resources district office.