On March 16, the Edmonton Journal published an article focusing on the ongoing winter fish kill at Isle Lake, 80km west of Edmonton. The accompanying video shows hundreds of floating dead fish in ice breaks on the lake; thousands more can be seen gasping for air due to the low oxygen levels of the lake [...]
In just under 50 years, from 1963 to 2012, over 350,000 wellsites have been drilled in Alberta, which contributes to the industrial footprint on the landscape. The Alberta Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Resource Development (AESRD) requires that all upstream oil and gas sites(1) on both public and private lands must be reclaimed when they are [...]
As he saw the image materialize on his computer screen, Dr. Guillermo Castilla’s exhilaration grew. “I felt like I was looking at an open book telling the history of Alberta’s landscape of the last ten years,” says Castilla, a Remote Sensing Scientist with the ABMI’s Remote Sensing Group. “If there is a picture worth a [...]
Working for the ABMI as field technicians, crews of young scientists experience Alberta’s great landscape, hoping to unearth even its tiniest treasures. Some of its larger treasures, they found, are black and furry and love pasta. Here are some of their stories. At two in the morning the damp, cool and moist air clings to [...]
ABMI Releases New Video Not only does Alberta’s changing climate pose challenges for us humans, it does so for lots of other creatures as well. For a species like the Ferruginous Hawk, which already faces a variety of threats, climate change could have disastrous consequences for its survival in Alberta. So, how will climate change [...]
Today, Thursday December 5, 2013, the ABMI released the report: The Status of Biodiversity in the Athabasca Oil Sands Area. This report contains the first ever comprehensive analysis on the status of Alberta’s species in the Athabasca Oil Sands Area (AOSA). With a range of intensive activities occurring on the AOSA land base – from [...]
Vimeo videos of the ABMI’s inaugural speaker’s series presentations are now available! Find links below on topics ranging from biodiversity management and climate change adaptation to ecological recovery monitoring of reclaimed lands… The ABMI’s Application Centre develops products and services that build on ABMI’s core capacity to monitor long-term broad-scale changes in biodiversity. These applications [...]
The problems are clear. Due to human activity, Alberta faces a series of biodiversity-related challenges. We see declining caribou populations, fragmented landscapes, and increasing pressure on Alberta’s rare plants and animals. Finding solutions to these problems is part of the mandate of the newly minted Alberta Biodiversity Conservation (ABC) Chair program, launched at the University [...]