In this issue:
• Dr. Stan Boutin, ABMI Science Centre Co-Director, Awarded the Romanowski Medal
• Successful 2009 Field Season
• Application to the Land-use Framework
• Habitat Relationships: New to the ABMI Biodiversity Browser
 

Dr. Stan Boutin, ABMI Science Centre Co-Director, Awarded the Romanowski Medal

Congratulations to Dr. Stan Boutin, who has just been awarded the Royal Society of Canada's Miroslaw Romanowski Medal for scientific work relating to environmental problems. The prize is in honour of Dr. Miroslaw Romanowski, an applied physicist who worked for the NRC and specialized in calibration of standard units of measure. He was deeply concerned about the degradation of environment and argued that scientists must have an "unquestionable duty towards nature: we must protect it with all our means and forces..." With his many years of commitment to understanding and mitigating human impacts on boreal ecosystems, Stan exemplifies Romanowski's ideal.

Successful 2009 Field Season

In the Spring and Summer of 2009 the ABMI successfully surveyed 80 sites across the province. Data entry is now underway and field samples have been sent to the experts at the Royal Alberta Museum for analysis and identification. We expect that the 2009 data will be available from the website early in the new year.

Application to the Land-use Framework

During the past 18 months the ABMI has worked closely with the Secretariat of the Land-use Framework to ensure the two initiatives are well integrated. For both the Lower Athabasca and South Saskatchewan Regional Plans, information from the ABMI was used extensively while selecting indicators and establishing targets and thresholds for these indicators. In addition the ABMI has been identified as the source of data that will be used to evaluate changes over time in approximately 75% of the land, water, and biodiversity indicators identified in these plans.

Habitat Relationships: New to the ABMI Biodiversity Browser

We are pleased to announce new functionality of the ABMI website Biodiversity Browser for vascular plants and birds. Now you can explore the distribution of your favourite bird or plant species anywhere in Alberta.

Occurrence and Relative Abundance

Under Habitat Relationships on each species' Biodiversity Browser page, you can now view occurrence and relative abundance graphs and details for each bird and plant species we have detected to date. This information can be viewed for the entire province, or just for the sites in the particular area of the province you are interested in.

Occurrence is the percentage of sites surveyed to date at which the species was detected. Relative Abundance is the number of individuals of the species detected per site. At this time the values presented in these graphs are raw—they have not been corrected or standardized for influences such as human footprint or latitude.

Occurrence of the American Crow (Corvus brachyrhynchos). In this example from the ABMI Biodiversity Browser we can see that the American Crow was found at 30% of all the sites we have surveyed to date, at 25% of the sites surveyed to date in the Boreal Natural Region, at less than 10% of the sites surveyed to date in the Foothills Natural Region, etc. In the online application detailed information for each bar is displayed upon rollover.

Relative Abundance of the Yellow-rumped Warbler (Dendroica coronata). In this example from the ABMI Biodiversity Browser we can see that we found 0.9 Yellow-rumped Warblers per site surveyed to date in the entire province, and 0.3 per site surveyed to date in the Parkland Natural Region.