By Dan Wismer, GIS Analyst Backed by peer-reviewed research, GBtools were developed to help support grizzly bear conservation efforts and land management decisions. GBtools consist of a series of python scripts that accept user-input and are designed to run in ArcMap. As old code is refactored and new add-ons developed, GBtools have evolved to narrow down the question resource managers ask the most—how does a proposed development project effect grizzly bear habitat? The Habitat States…

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In January 2018, the Grizzly Bear Program started a new project that took us into new territory. The actual science is right in our wheelhouse. It’s about bear use on a working landscape, and it deploys methods that the team has used and refined over many field seasons: barbed wire, scent lures, and DNA. We’ve used these techniques to study the effects of things like forestry, oil and gas development, and roads. But last year,…

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The Land-use Knowledge Network expands as the province develops more regional land use plansBy Jeff Wiehler Alberta’s current approach to land use planning dates back to 2007, when the Land-use Framework introduced a vision of economic and environmental prosperity for the province. fRI Research has contributed to this vision by providing resources, research and information for planners, planning practitioners and land use decision makers. The Land-use Knowledge Network was launched in 2011 and the Land…

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When Alex Chubaty began his post-doc, he was taking on a big problem. An ecologist specializing in insect behaviour, Chubaty joined Eliot McIntire’s lab at the Pacific Forestry Centre to try to get a handle on an insect that was behaving in a particular damaging way to BC’s forests, and was well on its way to devouring vast numbers of lodgepole pine in Alberta. Chubaty’s challenge was to model the spread of mountain pine beetle…

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By Caitlin Tomaszewski In 2013 a massive flood hit the City of Calgary and surrounding areas. While the physical impact on towns and cities in Southern Alberta was easy to quantify, little research was done to assess the state of rural riparian areas in the Bow and Oldman watersheds in the Eastern Slopes. In 2015, the Water Program of fRI Research undertook a project in partnership with the Government of Alberta to assess the health…

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By Dan Wismer, GIS Analyst It was summer of 2017 where Barry Nobert, one of our Caribou Program’s wildlife biologists requested that the GIS program build a new set of data processing tools for our partners. Building custom tools is nothing new for the GIS program, but this request forked away from what has traditionally been done in the past. We tend to build custom tools using python and leveraging Esri’s arcpy library. Python script…

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Looking out over the Athabasca River in Jasper National Park. In the warm, dry year of 1646, a fire burned in Jasper National Park on the mountain slopes beside the Athabasca River. The flames swept down the valley on the wind, consuming many trees. But some, by adaptation or chance, survived to grow on. In fact, they may have flourished as their neighbours that once crowded them toppled one by one. Nutrients cycled back into…

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