Wetlands provide numerous benefits to society, including clean and abundant water, flood mitigation, and habitat for wildlife. These benefits have become increasingly apparent, as wetlands are lost across Alberta resulting in greater risk to our infrastructure and biodiversity. Starting with agricultural settlement in southern Alberta, it’s estimated that approximately 64% of wetlands have been permanently [...]
“It absolutely makes my day when I can look at a row of numbers and identify patterns that are ecologically meaningful.” – MC Roy, Wetland Ecologist, ABMI From an early age, it seems Marie-Claude Roy was destined to be a wetland ecologist. Now, as the resident wetland ecologist at the ABMI, Marie-Claude, or MC as [...]
Gathering reliable measurements of animal populations is a long-standing challenge for wildlife biologists around the world. Estimating population size and density requires researchers to count individual specimens; this is an especially difficult task when working with species that move (sometimes over large geographic ranges) or live in difficult-to-traverse landscapes, like Alberta’s Rocky Mountains or its [...]
It was a day like any other when Varina Crisfield, the ABMI’s Vascular Plant Taxonomist, showed up for work at the ABMI’s Processing Centre at the Royal Alberta Museum*. Little did she know, she was about to achieve something few Alberta botanists can expect to do these days: identify a new species record for the [...]
“Spending your life staring through a microscope, obsessing over tiny features on tiny things that no one cares about but you.” If you think this is the life of a taxonomist, you’re not entirely wrong – but you’re overlooking a key truth. Without taxonomists we wouldn’t have labels for species or a common language to [...]
Today, Thursday December 5, 2013, the ABMI released the report: The Status of Biodiversity in the Athabasca Oil Sands Area. This report contains the first ever comprehensive analysis on the status of Alberta’s species in the Athabasca Oil Sands Area (AOSA). With a range of intensive activities occurring on the AOSA land base – from [...]
The problems are clear. Due to human activity, Alberta faces a series of biodiversity-related challenges. We see declining caribou populations, fragmented landscapes, and increasing pressure on Alberta’s rare plants and animals. Finding solutions to these problems is part of the mandate of the newly minted Alberta Biodiversity Conservation (ABC) Chair program, launched at the University [...]
ABMI was heavily involved in the 16th International Boreal Forest Research Association (IBFRA) conference held at the Shaw Conference Center in Edmonton from October 7-10, 2013. Given that the ABMI is a pan-provincial biodiversity monitoring agency, much of its monitoring activity takes place in the Boreal Region of Alberta. As a result, the ABMI has [...]