Sarah Khan
Sessions in which Sarah Khan attends
terça-feira 29 outubro, 2024
The Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute (ABMI) defines human footprint as the visible alteration or conversion of native ecosystems to temporary or permanent residential, recreational, agricultural, or industrial landscapes. It also includes land that is periodically reset to earlier successional conditions by industrial activities such as forestry harvest areas and seismic lines. To monitor and map human footprint across Alberta, the ABMI, in partnership with the Alberta Human Footprin...
Sessions: Human footprint datasets for Canada: mapping and monitoring in support of land and resource managementDisturbance is a key component of boreal-forest ecosystems, impacting their structure and functions. In Alberta, disturbances are both natural and anthropogenic, including > 30,000 sqkm of harvest areas. The recovery of all types of forest disturbance influences not only local landscapes, but also carbon dynamics and biodiversity. In the face of a changing climate, the imp...
From ancient cave drawings depicting hunting grounds to hand-sketched layouts of backyard gardens, humans conceptualize space through map making. Maps serve both to capture what exists on the landscape and to plan future uses by intentionally defining where specific activities can happen. Modern satellite technology creates geospatial datasets that can contribute to current and proposed land use management planning, all underpinned by the pursuit of the public good.Background
Maintaining undisturbed habitat is key to the recovery strategy of the Woodland Caribou boreal population. Seismic lines have been identified as a human footprint feature that requires specific attention for habitat restoration in part because linear features are linked to increases in the predation rates of caribou as they provide lines of sight and easy transportation routes for predators. It is estimated that there are hundreds of thousands of kilometers of seismic lines within Alberta (AB...
Large-scale habitat inventories are necessary for understanding how human land-use, natural disturbances (e.g., fire) and climate change are influencing ecological processes, species declines and how restoration can address these changes. Within the boreal forest of Alberta, Canada anthropogenic habitat alteration, also referred to as human footprint or the physical disturbance of a landscape as a result of human activity, covers over 19% of the land area. Much of this human footprint is not ...
Session Human footprint datasets for Canada: mapping and monitoring in support of land and resource managementHuman activities have disturbed biodiversity, ecosystems, and ecological processes over the last century. Given the growing trends of habitat loss and biodiversity decline, understanding patterns of human pressures has become a crucial element of conservation planning. In this context, cumulative pressure mapping is used to quantify the extent and intensity of multiple pressure...
Regional and provincial conservation efforts require detailed human pressure mapping to manage and mitigate human impacts effectively. However, in the province of British Columbia (BC), existing efforts to map human pressures have faced significant challenges, particularly in adequately capturing their full extent. The Geospatial Centre of Biodiversity Pathways at the University of Northern British Columbia, in collaboration with the West Moberly First Nations and the Alberta Biodiversity Mon...
Algal blooms, typically consisting of cyanobacteria which can produce harmful toxins, are a recurring problem on lakes around the world. Although Alberta has long-term sampling programs on selected lakes, monitoring is limited in time and space. Satellite remote sensing offers a way to monitor cyanobacteria blooms across the entire ice-free season and track spatial patterns of bloom development, dynamics, and spread across lakes. The Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute (ABMI), Alb...
