While other children were reading comic books, Jerome Cranston was poring over atlases of the world. As a child he also spent many hours in the air getting a bird’s eye view of Canadian landscapes from the cockpit of his father’s plane. “I really need a picture to understand something,” says Cranston, a GIS1 Analyst [...]
Now that it’s finally spring and our world is turning green, many of us are probably thinking about gardens and backyard BBQs and quality time outdoors. Here at the ABMI, we wish we had more time for BBQs, but we’ve got the outdoors part covered as we gear up for another season collecting data on [...]
Albertans have a new resource at their fingertips that provides detailed information on hundreds of Alberta’s plant and animal species. Welcome to the ABMI’s new online Data & Analytics Portal—a one-stop-shop that provides easy access to our extensive biodiversity-related data, reports, and maps. A key part of the Data & Analytics Portal is the ABMI [...]
The Alberta Human Footprint Mapping Program (AHFMP)—a joint initiative of the ABMI and the Government of Alberta—has recently completed a major update to Alberta’s Human Footprint Inventory. Over the next few months, we’ll be highlighting key elements of this comprehensive new dataset. Human footprint is all around. Not the muddy kind in your front hallway; [...]
What do you get when you put together a room full of experts in remote sensing, environmental science, and the Internet of Things? It sounds like the start of a joke, but the answer is the Boreal Ecosystem Recovery and Assessment (BERA) Project. Hailing from academia, industry, government, and ENGOs including the ABMI, this diverse [...]
We all know that biodiversity, like exercise and broccoli, is good for us. For the most part, governments and land managers recognize this too. For example, the Alberta Government maintains a network of parks and protected areas (PPAs) throughout the province as part of its vision of sustainable resource development. Many Albertans use these spaces [...]
Periodically, the ABMI releases an ABMI Science Letter to share the methodology and results of our latest scientific endeavours. Today, we’re excited to release our fifth Science Letter: Effects of Industrial Sectors on Species Abundance in Alberta. Read on to find out more! We at the ABMI spend a lot of time thinking about biodiversity. You’ve heard [...]
Natural ecosystems provide many benefits—services like clean drinking water, timber, and productive harvests. Each of these “ecosystem services” is the product of complex interactions among species, landscapes, and people. This complexity also means that ecosystem services can be difficult to measure and assess. Because their value is hard to quantify, ecosystem services may be ignored in [...]