You might already know that the ABMI’s Biodiversity Browser is a virtual encyclopedia of life in Alberta—with more than 3,000 species profiles of birds, mammals, amphibians, soil mites, vascular plants, lichens, and mosses at your fingertips! But you may not know the many ways the recently updated portal can support research and reporting. The Biodiversity [...]
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Exploring the Biodiversity Browser: Alberta’s Encyclopedia of Life
The ABMI is pleased to announce that the Biodiversity Browser (BB) has been updated with new species modelling, new mammal sections, and an updated design to optimize navigation. So, let’s delve a little deeper into what you can find and do on the portal. The ABMI’s Biodiversity Browser is a versatile repository full of freely [...]
Sound Bites: What’s Going On With ABMI Acoustics?
What’s all this noise about acoustics? With support from the Bayne Lab at the University of Alberta, the ABMI has used autonomous recording units (ARUs) and sound technology to monitor the environment for over 10 years. Why ARUs? These robust sensors can be set up and left in the field for months or years, allowing [...]
A Closer Look at Biodiversity Metrics: The Intactness Index
Here at the ABMI, we spend a lot of time thinking about large-scale changes to biodiversity and landscapes across Alberta. A core part of our work asks: what impacts does the human footprint of land use activities (like forestry, energy, agriculture) have in our province? Back in 2007, in our early days of data collection [...]
Applying remote sensing techniques to wide-scale vegetation inventories
The following blog comes to us courtesy of Sydney Toni, summarizing a recent paper in Ecological Solutions and Evidence. Ideally, the information we collect to manage wildlife habitat is many things: high-resolution, consistent, and covering all areas of interest. The gold standard of habitat assessment, ground-based surveys, provides high-quality data at particular locations but can’t cover a [...]
Making Waves – Jenet Dooley, Wetland Ecologist
Jenet Dooley defies labels (except for being a self-described “long-time swamp monster”). Yes, technically she is a wetland ecologist, but to Jenet, that title doesn’t adequately describe the interplay between the evolving nuances of ecology and the project management and coordination of monitoring programs. Like wetlands themselves, Jenet is hard to pin down, and she [...]
Meet Alberta’s Wetland Atlas
We are pleased to announce the release of version 1.0 of the Wetland Atlas of Alberta, a first-of-its-kind effort to present the results of our wetland monitoring programs in an integrated, interactive, Open-Access online report. This comprehensive new resource includes province-wide inventories of wetland habitat developed by the ABMI and data collected by the ABMI [...]
Making it Look Easy – Joan Fang, Senior Systems Analyst
February 11 is the International Day of Women and Girls in Science. To celebrate, all February, we’ll be sharing the stories of some of the many women+ at the ABMI who have shaped our organization with their experience, expertise, and dedication. We are inspired by their hard work and the legacy that they are leaving [...]