All posts in Bird’s Eye View

ABMI forest regeneration work featured on ‘Geo for Good’

ABMI Remote Sensing Scientist Jen Hird presented as part of Google Earth Outreach’s Geo For Good lightning talk series on January 27. This event has now ended. Across the field of biodiversity monitoring, technological advances are making possible new kinds of observation and analysis. Some of the biggest changes have come from the deployment of [...]

A new Wetland Inventory for Alberta

We’re pleased to announce the release of the ABMI Alberta-wide Wetland Inventory—our most up-to-date and high-resolution wetland data yet. Several years in the making, this work would not have been possible without the generous support of Alberta Environment and Parks, or the rapid advance of remote-sensing technologies. Thanks to the availability of incredible open-source data [...]

Announcing the launch of our new, enhanced Mapping Portal

We’re pleased to announce the launch of our brand-new Mapping Portal, featuring new data layers, more functions, and an enhanced user interface—all inspired by feedback from you, our users. Planned as a tool for directly viewing and interacting with the ABMI’s species and geospatial data, the original Mapping Portal was launched in 2017 as part [...]

Bird declines in North America: a deeper dive using long-term ABMI and BAM data

A recent paper highlighted the decline of North American bird populations. Guest blogger Dr. Peter Solymos, a statistical ecologist with the ABMI and Boreal Avian Modelling Project (BAM), digs deeper into the story and provides insights from the long-term ABMI + BAM data set. A paper by Ken Rosenberg et al. in Science made headlines last [...]

Seeking (and finding!) ALPHA

Content for this post, by Evan DeLancey and Kurt Illerbrun, is adapted from an ABMI feature that recently appeared in the Alberta Society of Professional Biologists’ newsletter, BIOS. If you’re interested in learning more about ALPHA, the ABMI will be presenting a webinar on the topic on February 28—register for free here. One of the [...]

A Deeper Dive into Human Footprint in Alberta

The ABMI recently released a new report on the status of human footprint in Alberta. Depending on your particular interests, you were probably struck by different aspects of the report—maybe the fact that 78% of central Alberta is now under human footprint, or the fact that in the Athabasca Oil Sands Area, that number is [...]

ABMI Releases Preliminary Report on the Status of Human Footprint in Alberta

Between 1999 and 2015, human activity in Alberta visibly converted over 23,000 square kilometres of native ecosystems into residential, recreational, or industrial landscapes, an area 3.5 times the size of Banff National Park. Feb 9 Update: This report received extensive coverage in the media. While some media outlets provided well-informed, balanced coverage, others resorted to [...]

Who is the ABMI? Get to know Jerome Cranston, GIS Analyst

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 [...]