As he saw the image materialize on his computer screen, Dr. Guillermo Castilla’s exhilaration grew. “I felt like I was looking at an open book telling the history of Alberta’s landscape of the last ten years,” says Castilla, a Remote Sensing Scientist with the ABMI’s Remote Sensing Group. “If there is a picture worth a [...]
Due to human activity, the global environment is undergoing significant and rapid change. To assess the scope and impact of these changes, the science of remote sensing[1] is constantly evolving and delivering more powerful tools to observe the Earth’s surface. Over the past decade, large, freely-available remote sensing data sets have also become available. The [...]
Monitoring change in the Earth’s surface over local, regional, and global scales in a comprehensive, synoptic manner regularly relies on remote-sensing imagery collected from platforms such as airplanes or satellites. The growing archive of currently-accessible satellite imagery, which now covers over four decades, continues to support the increasing need for more accurate and integrated information on [...]
Accuracy assessment is an important step in the production of any remote sensing-based map, and was a major component in the production of the ABMI Remote Sensing Group’s Wall-to-Wall Alberta Land Cover Map version 2.1 (circa 2000). Assessing the accuracy of a province-wide map is no small task, particularly when the map is not a [...]
This September, our very own Dr. Greg McDermid of the ABMI Remote Sensing Group was honoured with the 2012 CAFA (Confederation of Alberta Faculty Associations) Distinguished Academic Early Career Award at an awards ceremony in Edmonton. The award recognizes those academic staff members who have made outstanding contributions to the wider community while in the [...]
Will McInnes is a recent graduate of the University of Calgary’s Masters in Geographic Information Systems (MGIS) program in the Department of Geography, and author of an ABMI-funded MGIS thesis project that successfully tested a multi-temporal remotely-sensed data set in the mapping of native vs. non-native grasslands over several different Albertan prairie subregions. An expansion [...]
Though somewhat bittersweet, our crews are very excited to report a successful end to the 2012 field campaign. Our team lead, Sande Dalton, reminisces fondly about the sunny days hiking through Alberta’s northern boreal forest and nights of camping at beautiful Christina Lake. Other crew members included Chun Hua Zhang, Riley Iwamoto, and Lauren Peters. [...]
After months of hard work, the ABMI Remote Sensing Group is very pleased to announce the completion and release of the ABMI Wall-to-wall Land Cover Map version 2.1! A long-awaited data product, the spatially exhaustive polygon vector layer represents land cover across Alberta circa 2000, uses 11 land cover classes, and contains roughly one million, [...]