Canadian Shield
The northeastern part of Alberta, northern parts of Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, and Quebec, as well as most of Labrador (the mainland portions of the province of Newfoundland and Labrador), are located on a vast rock base known as the Canadian Shield. The Shield mostly consists of eroded hilly terrain and contains many lakes and important rivers used for hydroelectric production, particularly in northern Quebec and Ontario. The shield also encloses an area of wetlands, the Hudson Bay lowlands. Some particular regions of the Shield are referred to as mountain ranges, including the Torngat and Laurentian Mountains.
The Shield cannot support intensive agriculture, although there is subsistence agriculture and small dairy farms in many of the river valleys and around the abundant lakes, particularly in the southern regions. Boreal forest covers much of the shield, with a mix of conifers that provide valuable timber resources in areas such as the Central Canadian Shield forests ecoregion that covers much of Northern Ontario. The region is known for its extensive mineral reserves.
The Canadian Shield is known for its vast minerals, such as emeralds, diamonds and copper. The Canadian shield is also called the mineral house.
Canadian Interior Plains
The Canadian Prairies are part of a vast sedimentary plain covering much of Alberta, southern Saskatchewan, and southwestern Manitoba, as well as much of the region between the Rocky Mountains and the Great Slave and Great Bear lakes in Northwest Territories. The plains generally describes the expanses of (largely flat) arable agricultural land which sustain extensive grain farming operations in the southern part of the provinces. Despite this, some areas such as the Cypress Hills and Alberta Badlands are quite hilly and the prairie provinces contain large areas of forest such as the Mid-Continental Canadian forests.The size is roughly 1,900,000km2