Every spring, in the final weeks of April, the offices of the Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute in Vegreville seem a bit like somebody kicked over an anthill. Staff are scrambling to get everything organized before sending dozens of field technicians out across the province — from the Canadian Shield in the far northeast to the [...]
In early January, Brandi Mogge, Land Access Manager for the Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute (ABMI), headed to southern Alberta from the ABMI’s offices at the University of Alberta in Edmonton on her first trip to visit landowners and request access to their land. She was prepared to spend her week formally explaining why the ABMI [...]
“Without lichens, the world would be bereft of beauty – lichens are the bling, the colour, the contrast in many of our ecosystems, including our urban environments. Beautiful oranges, red sexual structures, geometric patterns on rocks and concrete. And because we’re only just beginning to understand the diversity they harbour, we also don’t know the [...]
by Anne McIntosh Lodgepole pine forests in western Canada are experiencing an unprecedented mountain pine beetle (MPB) outbreak, and the ecosystem-level effects of ongoing expansion of MPB into novel habitats east of the Canadian Rockies are unknown. This led me to attempt to better understand the ecological impacts of this new disturbance in lodgepole pine [...]
Business and Biodiversity. Two words you don’t often expect to see together. At the ABMI, we understand that functional economies are dependent on functional ecosystems. But, we probably aren’t surprised when we hear the rhetoric that we can’t “afford” to protect the environment when the economy is weak. So, it was heartening for me to [...]
They might look a little like aliens from a 1960s science fiction film, but soil mites are important, often overlooked and under-appreciated aspects of biodiversity. But the Royal Alberta Museum’s Dave Walter (Taxonomic Advisor / Acarologist) is out to change all of that.
Our very own Rob Hinchliffe (Lab Supervisor/Aquatic Invertebrate Taxonomist) at the Royal Alberta Museum truly lives his work. As an avid fly fisherman, he knows the streams of Alberta… and most (if not all) of what lives in them. Lucky for us and other Albertans, he documents his experience in his blog Trout Fodder “Musings of [...]
One of the basic principles underlying the ABMI is that one cannot know if species abundances are changing, if one does not know what they were to start with. For example, many readers of this blog may have heard of the worldwide decline of the Honey Bee (Apis mellifera), our agricultural pollinator mainstay. We have [...]