This article first appeared in the winter 2021 issue of BIOS, the Alberta Society of Professional Biologists’ quarterly newsletter, as part of the ABMI’s regular feature. White-tailed deer would rather not have a white Christmas. Or new years. Or any time, really. That’s according to a new paper from the ABMI’s Caribou Monitoring Unit (CMU), [...]
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 [...]
Woodland caribou populations in Alberta and BC are declining, and many will be lost without fast management action. To stem the decline in local population loss, intensively applying a cocktail of management actions is more effective than applying actions weakly or alone. These are some of the key conclusions of a new study just published [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
On February 7, 2018, the ABMI released a new report on human footprint in Alberta. While some media outlets provided well-informed, balanced coverage of the report, others resorted to sensationalist headlines that unfortunately misrepresented the report’s key findings. The following is the ABMI’s response to this inaccurate coverage. By Jim Herbers and Tara Narwani; 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 [...]
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 [...]