Entries by Ted MacKinnon

Annapolis Valley Trails Coalition: An Enterprise GIS Solution

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

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.

Takla Nation’s way of Creating Base Maps for Collecting Information Out on the Land

With the growth of activities and staff in the Lands Department of the Takla Nation, GIS data management has been expanding at a rapid rate. Field data collection is an important part of the spatial data management. In combination of the existing Open Source tools we have been using to manage our information, we are using an application called “Geopaparazzi” for field work. I will be illustrating the steps to use this customizable application from create of basemaps, vector overlays to data collection and integration.