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. [...]
Finally, “A Day in the Life of an ABMI Terrestrial Crew” is online. It shows a typical day monitoring in southern Alberta with some examples of biodiversity we found in the field. (Here is a link to a slideshow/video: https://vimeo.com/49414801 password:abmi1234) Note: we weren’t able to identify all of the plants, if anyone knows the identity [...]
UofA and the Royal Alberta Museum were hotbeds of activity again this year as taxonomic staff from the RAM (ABMI’s Processing Centre) and our summer monitoring field crews came together to clean, sort and identify thousands of specimens found in the field. At the UofA, the monitoring crews were divided into three labs: invertebrates, lichens and [...]
They might look a little like aliens from a 1960s science fiction film, but soil mites are important, often overlooked and under-appreciated aspects of biodiversity. But the Royal Alberta Museum’s Dave Walter (Taxonomic Advisor / Acarologist) is out to change all of that.
Our very own Rob Hinchliffe (Lab Supervisor/Aquatic Invertebrate Taxonomist) at the Royal Alberta Museum truly lives his work. As an avid fly fisherman, he knows the streams of Alberta… and most (if not all) of what lives in them. Lucky for us and other Albertans, he documents his experience in his blog Trout Fodder “Musings of [...]
One of the basic principles underlying the ABMI is that one cannot know if species abundances are changing, if one does not know what they were to start with. For example, many readers of this blog may have heard of the worldwide decline of the Honey Bee (Apis mellifera), our agricultural pollinator mainstay. We have [...]
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, [...]
We’re wrapping up this year’s fieldwork on our Rare Plants project! It’s been a great summer – 150 plots were sampled (50m x 50m each) in July and August across the Lower Athabasca region. The project is a partnership between the ABMI, the EMCLA (Ecological Monitoring Committee for the Lower Athabasca), and the Neilsen Lab [...]