The ABMI will wrap-up our 3-year collaborative Biodiversity Management and Climate Change Adaptation project at the end of June 2015. This project has examined the potential impacts of climate change on Alberta’s biodiversity and developed knowledge and tools to support the management of Alberta’s species and ecosystems in a changing climate. We’ve delved into a wide range of topics, including: the vulnerability of [...]
Say ‘Cheese’! ABMI Implements New Monitoring Protocols Using Camera Traps
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 [...]
Finding Rare Plants in Alberta’s Northeast
This story originally appeared in the Alberta Native Plant Council‘s newsletter, Iris, published November 2014. If a botanist went for a walk in the Lower Athabasca region of Alberta, how likely would it be that he would encounter a rare plant species? How long in kilometres or time would she have to walk to find one? If [...]
Better Environmental Management Through Monitoring 2015: ABMI Speaker Series day
On February 17, more than 300 people attended the ABMI’s second annual Speakers’ Series, Better Environmental Management Through Monitoring 2015. Facilitated by Brian Keating, host of the program Going Wild and former head of conservation outreach at the Calgary Zoo, the day brought together presenters from the ABMI and other organizations to talk about their work [...]
Better Environmental Management Through Monitoring: The Story of the Yellow Rail in the Lower Athabasca
This story originally appeared in AEMERA’s Newsletter, published March 31, 2015. “The approval holder shall provide a plan or participate in the development of a plan for the monitoring and mitigation of the Yellow Rail (Coturnicops noveboracensis) by [given date] to the satisfaction of the Director…” – Approval condition for oil sands mine project The [...]
Dealing with uncertainty: how will Alberta’s boreal birds respond to climate change?
If you’ve ever listened to a forest in the spring, the sound you hear is dozens of birds singing and calling to one another: sending and receiving signals with sound. It may sound like just noise to some, but there is an underlying pattern. It turns out that you could say the same thing when [...]
The Recovery of Porsild’s Bryum
Porsild’s Bryum Provincial Recovery Team video by Alberta Environment and Sustainable Resource Development Along the Whitehorse Creek in Whitehorse Wildland Park in Alberta’s Rocky Mountains lives an Endangered* species. It’s green and cushy, and it loves water. Porsild’s Bryum is one of more than 1,000 species of moss found in Canada. Like many moss species, [...]
The Latest Buzz on Alberta’s Wild Bees
How many different species of wild bees would you guess we have here in Alberta? How many can you name? Most people drastically underestimate the diversity of bees that call this province home and think of them only as either bumblebees or honeybees. The reality is much richer, with a surprising estimate of over 300 [...]