Entries by Ted MacKinnon

Northwest Infrastructure Mapping Project

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The Northwest Infrastructure Mapping Project was initially completed in 2014 for a partnership of conservation groups based in the Skeena River watershed at a time when multiple proponents were vying to construct pipelines to supply the buzzing liquified natural gas (LNG) export industry on the northwest coast of BC.

Five years later, the map is being updated with current constructed and proposed developments within the energy, mining, forestry, communication, and transportation sectors.

Left but Not Forgotten: Mapping Waste Residue Piles in British Columbia using LiDAR and Photogrammetry

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The Canadian forestry sector is undergoing a period of rapid change due to the advancement and increasing affordability of modern geospatial technologies.

To support field operations, and to anticipate changing legislation within British Columbia regarding the measurement of waste residue as a product of logging operations, the presentation describes a case study performed by the Scaling and Remote Sensing departments at TDB Consultants comparing traditional field survey methods to both airborne LiDAR and photogrammetrically derived point clouds.

Assessing Set-Aside Old-Growth Forests with Airborne LiDAR Metrics

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Old-growth forests provide a variety of services to human populations such as water, carbon storage and ecotourism. Despite the value of old-growth forests, this resource is constantly under anthropogenic pressure. Airborne LiDAR Metrics were applied to estimate attributes of old-growth forests (ex. height, canopy cover, vertical complexity, understory density) and develop an index for old-growth forests.

This research brings light to OGMAs’ definition and their evaluation through the use of a relatively new technique, LiDAR. More importantly, the identification of the amount and location of old-growth forests over the landscape can aid to the conservation of this rare resource and its services .

Annapolis Valley Trails Coalition: An Enterprise GIS Solution

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Annapolis Valley Trails Coalition (AVTC) manages and maintains the Harvest Moon Trail that runs from Grand-Pré to Annapolis Royal through little towns, agricultural fields and along the Annapolis River. Over the course of the fall semester, students at COGS (Centre of Geographic Sciences) explored scalable Enterprise GIS solutions to manage trail assets. They modelled and built a spatial database and integrated it within desktop and web GIS solutions.

Canada’s Human Footprint; Finding the Wild, Intact, and Human Dominated

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Canada is one of the signatories on the Convention on Biodiversity and its Aichi Biodiversity Targets. With these ambitious conservation targets, there is a need to better understand the distribution of threats to natural systems across the Canadian landscape. Global footprint maps have shown Canada as relatively ‘wild’ however, the threats mapped represent only a subset of threats relevant to Canada as the country still lacks a national scale cumulative threat study. Mapping threats to biodiversity on a national scale will help determine what systems are most intact and which areas are heavily threatened.