FrontCounter BC Discovery Tool

Discovery Tool is designed to help you view an area of land within B.C. to determine basic information on how the land is currently being used. The information can be used to assist you in choosing an appropriate application area for your needs.

For example, privately held lands, provincial parks, national parks or First Nations Reserves are some of the highly constrained lands in their potential for Crown land authorizations and will require you to contact FrontCounter BC to determine whether your proposed activity is permissible. Avoiding highly constrained lands when seeking potential candidate areas for your proposed application may improve your likelihood of success.

You can use this tool:

• To discover general land use, a colour legend will appear when you click on each layer name
• To create your area of interest (as a placemark, path or polygon) in the correct location you are interested in
• To look at your area of interest in relation to other land interests to see if it is available and compatible
• To create an electronic file of your area of interest that can be submitted with your electronic application

Disclaimer: This tool does not show all interests. You should contact FrontCounter BC to see if other interests exist that may conflict with your application before submitting it. Your saved geomark can be emailed to FrontCounterBC@gov.bc.ca.

Google Earth

Using the Discovery Tool requires Google Earth to be installed on your computer. Google Earth step-by-step tutorials will help you become familiar with the tool.

The tool will work on the following versions of Google Earth:

• Google Earth (pre-download versions)
• Google Earth Pro (all versions, including newest version, which is a free download)

Discovery Tool will not work on Google Earth (new browser-based version).

Download Google Earth

Discovery Tool

Once you have downloaded Google Earth, you can launch the Discovery Tool.

Launch Discovery Tool

Troubleshooting Discovery Tool errors

If you are unable to view private and Crown land ownership layers:

• Turn off the following Google Earth layers:
  • "Explore the Ocean" - in the Ocean Layer section
  • "Google Earth Community Layer" - in the Gallery Layer section
  • Terrain Layer

If this does not resolve the issue, you can also revert to an older version of Google Earth and/or clear your Google Earth cache and load the latest version of the Discovery Tool.

Clearing your Google Earth cache:

• Load Google Earth
• On the menu bar, select "File -> Server Signout"
• On the menu bar, select "Tools-> Options"
• In the pop up window, select "Cache -> Delete Cache File"
• On the menu bar, select "File -> Server Sign-in"
• Exit Google Earth

Launching the latest version of Discovery Tool

• Click the "Launch Discovery Tool" on this page to load the latest version of Discovery Tool. If you had the FrontCounter BC KML saved under "My Places" in Google Earth, you may need to right-click on that layer name and select "Refresh" to see the updated information