A great place to start looking at lichens in Alberta is in Crimson Lake Provincial Park located just northwest of Rocky Mountain House. Here, you can walk through a few different forest types in the course of a 10 km hike. You’ll find burnt stumps covered in baby Cladonia lichens and Cockleshell lichens. Veteran poplar [...]
by Elyse Williams Ever wondered how many species of plants, birds and mammals call a hectare (about 2 football fields) of Alberta native prairie home? And, I bet you can’t guess how many hamburgers this hectare can produce… To get the answers, visit the ABMI’s interactive display at The 2013 Cattle Trail exhibit at the Calgary [...]
In the summer of 2012, we spent a day with an ABMI field crew in southern Alberta and we observed the painstaking process involved in monitoring terrestrial field sites. More than that, we saw a wide range of beautiful vascular plants that makes this part of Alberta unique and rich in biodiversity. Watch the video here. Thanks [...]
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 [...]