Motivation
Earlier assessments of Caribou habitat gain and loss relied on coarse-scale Landsat imagery and assumed, rather than tested, rates of habitat recovery. Land managers, Indigenous communities, conservation organizations, and government decision-makers needed accessible information on how disturbance and recovery changed across ranges over time. Better evidence could inform restoration and conservation of forest ecosystems, support species at risk, and help evaluate carbon storage and other forest values.
The project
The Caribou Habitat Information Platform was a two-year effort to build on previous habitat-change work and make current information publicly accessible. The platform brought together an extensible backend data model for updates, reusable command-line tools for filtering and aggregating datasets, and an interactive, responsive interface for querying the data.
The interface was designed to display Caribou ranges on a map and, for a selected range, report disturbance statistics and interactive charts. Users could explore results using configurable disturbance thresholds and review the composition of disturbance types.
Our results
The public platform now lets users browse Woodland Caribou populations, groups, and ranges by area and explore indicators of habitat disturbance and recovery. The main information portal was developed by the Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute (ABMI) and the Wildlife Science Centre of Biodiversity Pathways. It is available at chip.abmi.ca. The interactive disturbance and recovery tool was developed by Analythium and is available at here.