Innovation Anthology #80: WHEC Project Coordinator
In her famous song, Joni Mitchell said "You don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone."
Scientists involved with the Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute hope we never get to that point. So they’ve set out to catalogue and track all the flora and fauna across the province.
As Jim Herbers of the Institute explains, the scientists have mapped the province into a systematic grid of data collections points.
JIM HERBERS: Across the entire province there is a 20 kilometer spacing between each one of these points. And a point is visited once every five years. When we go to a site, we collect information on the understorey vegetation, the overstorey vegetation, trees, the bird community, moss community, lichen communicty, fungi and invertebrates in the soil. And we’ve also got an aquatic component that is coupled with that information about the state of Alberta’s aquatic resources.
And one of the key outcomes of the Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring program will be the development of a biodiversity index – a single number which Jim Herbers says will relate the state of biodiversity and whether its getting better or worse.
Thanks today to Alberta Research Council.
FOR INNOVATION ANTHOLOGY, I’M CHERYL CROUCHER
Guest
Holger Spaedtke,
Dept of Biological Sciences, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada,
Sponsor
Alberta Research Council
Established as the first provincial research organization in Canada, the Alberta Research Council is 85 years old. The Alberta Research Council (ARC) develops and commercializes technologies to give customers a competitive advantage. A leader in innovation, ARC provides solutions globally to the energy, life sciences, agriculture, environment, forestry and manufacturing sectors.
ARC performs about five per cent of the roughly $1.5 billion in R&D done in Alberta each year, and generates revenues of approximately $84 million per year. ARC operates from five sites across the province in Edmonton, Calgary, Vegreville and Devon and employs more than 600 highly-skilled people.
In January 2010, under the new Alberta Innovation Framework, the Alberta Research Council was restructured and incorporated into the new provincial agency Alberta Innovates Technology Futures.
Program Date: 2007-11-01