Version 1.0 2024-04-25
Alberta Environment and Protected Areas, in partnership with the Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute (ABMI), developed the Native Cover indicator to support biodiversity conservation and land-use management. ‘Native cover’ is defined as an area that is free of visible anthropogenic alteration (human footprint). ‘Human footprint’ is any area visibly altered for anthropogenic land use. The Native Cover indicator quantifies one facet of biodiversity loss by tracking the amount of native cover converted to human footprints, typically for settlement, agriculture, resource extraction, and transportation.
There are two types of native cover:
- Aquatic and wetland native cover (AWNC), representing the amount of aquatic habitat free of visible human footprint, including bogs, fens, swamps, marshes, open water, and riparian areas;
- Terrestrial native cover (TNC), representing the amount of upland (non-aquatic) habitat free of visible human footprint.
This repository contains the R code (src/) required for reproducing the results presented on GeoDiscover Alberta. The Native Cover Indicator for Alberta is a geospatial product that presents the status of AWNC and TNC for all HUC 8 watersheds in Alberta at five timesteps: 2010, 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021. Technical documentation describing the methodology and underlying data layers for this indicator can also be found on GeoDiscover Alberta.
For any questions regarding the scripts presented in this repository, GeoDiscover product, technical documentation, or about other applications of this indicator, please contact Brandon Allen (ABMI Senior Terrestrial Ecologist) at brandon.allen@ualberta.