A more realistic model, a more diverse landscape: Findings of the Modelling Team

A more realistic model, a more diverse landscape: Findings of the Modelling Team

There are many different ways to look at the landscapes and forests of Alberta’s Foothills. In this piece we enter a sophisticated landscape simulation with the Modeling team and watch how landscapes and biodiversity respond to fire when we take partial mortality into account.

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Why model partial mortality?

Why model partial mortality?

One potential consequence of mixed severity fire regimes is that some trees may survive lower intensity fires. This phenomenon is called “partial mortality”, and it can have a variety of consequences for what the landscape looks like and becomes after a fire. When trees survive, they may offer refuge for wildlife, help speed up revegetation by producing seeds, and/or help to maintain the presence of other types of vegetation like lichens. In this blog post, we discuss how the Landscapes in Motion modeling team is studying partial mortality in the Southern Foothills of Alberta using simulation models, and why this research is important for understanding the fire history of this region.

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Meet the Modelling Team!

Meet the Modelling Team!

Our field teams collect a massive amount of data from mountaintops and forests across the Eastern slopes of the Rockies. Because our team has the good fortune of such a big dataset, we can ask questions at a broader scale than a lot of other projects - we are even starting to predict what the future of these landscapes might look like.

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Placing oblique photos on the map

Placing oblique photos on the map

The Landscapes in Motion Oblique Photo Team has the daunting task of scaling mountains to repeat photographs taken up to a century ago by land surveyors. In previous posts we’ve described how these intrepid researchers locate sites, line up their photos, and what it’s like working in the field. With the summer fieldwork over, we now get to learn how they are harnessing technology to analyze landscapes in these repeat photographs and collect data from them.

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Landscapes in Motion goes to the Ecological Society of America meeting in New Orleans!

Landscapes in Motion goes to the Ecological Society of America meeting in New Orleans!

An important part of a researcher’s job is to learn more about what other scientists are doing in different institutions, fields, and ecosystems, and stay up-to-date on what they’re discovering. This pursuit of connections and knowledge-sharing took Ceres Barros to New Orleans for the Ecological Society of America’s annual meeting - find out what she presented and learned while she was there!

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