These image files are intentionally large, so that you can read the text. While you wait for them to load, feel free to read about the project.

The mission: Create an exhibit for less than $5,000 and in less than two months. Use existing trade-show exhibit armatures, and scrounge props and artifacts from researchers’ labs.

An extra challenge: Design and produce the exhibit in such a way that it showcases the capabilities of the large-scale printer that was available for use by researchers at Pacific Forestry Centre and maintains all the design guidelines prescribed for Natural Resources Canada displays and publications. As well, the exhibit had to satisfy requirements of the Official Languages Act, and all interpretive panels had to include text in both English and French. I developed the project plan for Alien Invasives, an exhibit to be installed on the mezzanine level of the Pacific Forestry Centre in time for National Forest Week. I worked with researchers, technicians and managers from Pacific Forestry Centre to develop the interpretive concept and text for the exhibit panels, large and small. Avril Goodall, the Natural Resources Canada graphic designer, determined and executed the design concept.

The Big Idea: Scientists and policy makers at the Canadian Forest Service, Natural Resources Canada, were working to protect Canada’s forests, economy and trade from alien invasive insects.

Audience: school teachers and students who visited Pacific Forestry Centre for National Forest Week’s Forest Fair celebration, staff and visitors.

Key Messages: 

  • Invasive alien forest species are non-native organisms that thrive in Canada’s forests.
  • They can be introduced to Canada’s forests both intentionally and inadvertently, through many different pathways.
  • They can seriously alter Canada’s forest ecosystems, causing environmental, economic and social damage that can be irrevocable.
  • The Government of Canada (Natural Resources Canada and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency) is working to prevent the introduction and spread of invasive alien forest species, and to protect Canada’s forests, economies, communities and trade.

Design and Installation: Each of the attached panels was attached to a 3.66 x 2.44-metre trade-show exhibit armature. Two of the backdrop panels were placed side by side in an arc (exhibit area 1), with the third backdrop facing it across the mezzanine (exhibit area 2). The backdrop panels were designed according to departmental common-look-and-feel design specifications, thereby allowing all other panels greater flexibility in design and presentation. Banners (~8 x 2 metres) with giant, high-resolution images of invasive species draped from steel cables framed each display area. In addition to the backdrop panels shown here, displays with interpretive signage in exhibit area 1 included:

  • A vine maple sapling, with holes drilled into the trunk. Life-size models of Asian longhorned beetles were glued into the holes.
  • A wooden spool for transporting cable, with an interpretive panel discussing how wooden packaging materials such as industrial spools and pallets transported many invasive species from other countries to Canada.
  • A display box of various invasive beetle specimens, on loan from the Pacific Forestry Centre entomology collection.

In exhibit area 2, displays with interpretive signage included:

  • A 1/2-metre-long, super-sized model of a mountain pine beetle.
  • A tree cookie and debarked log section showing beetle galleries.
  •  A funnel trap and bag, similar to those used in a recent lab study on how beetles breed and colonize new trees.

In addition, Avril Goodall designed, fabricated and installed a mobile of Asian gypsy moths in the middle of the Pacific Forestry Centre Atrium to complement the exhibit.

Water stored in the St. Mary’s Reservoir, north of Cardston, Alberta, insures area farmer’s crops against drought, which is common in that part of the province. In 1998, when the reservoir was drained to build a new spillway, researchers discovered tools used by ancient Albertans, as well as bones and footprints of at least 20 species of long-extinct animals.

“If you had stood there 11,000 years ago, you could have seen mammoths, horses, camel, caribou, bison, wolves, ground squirrels, and birds—maybe all at once,” says Len Hills, professor emeritus of geology and geophysics at the University of Calgary, and one of the scientists studying the site. Joining him in the research are university archaeologist Brian Kooyman and students Paul McNeil and Shayne Tolman, the site’s discoverer. “We know from the way the trackways are intermingled that these animals were right there, together. And man was there, too—he was part of that environment.”

The site is a window on the end of the Ice Age in southern Alberta. By inventorying the animals that lives in the region and studying the role of early humans at the site, Hills and colleagues reconstruct the ancient environment.

About 12,000 years ago, the site was an island delta at the end of a glacier-fed lake. When the St. Mary’s River later drained the lake, it created a massive floodplain west of the island Within a period of days or maybe weeks, large numbers of diverse animals visited the area to feed on the delta’s lush vegetation and drink from the nearby river, trampling the gound with their hooves and feet. Thick layers of sand and dirt blew eastward from the floodplain to bury tracks, bones, and tools. A series of brief geological moments were preserved, recording the presence of animals and humans over a 300-year period about 11,000 years ago.

The oldest tools are Clovis points, flaked-stone implements used by the first North Americans. Not far from where the team was excavating the skeleton of a horse, the researchers found toold that may have been used to kill the animal. Laboratory tests reveal traces of ancient horse protein on two of the Clovis points.

“We’ve known from other sites in North America that they hunted mammoths,” says Hills. “But this is the first sold evidence that Clovis people actually hunted horses. Maybe early humans influenced the extinction of these animals—not just mammoths, but horses, too.”

What precisely caused the disappearance of so many Ice Age mammals 12,000 to 9,000 years ago is uncertain. Climates and environments were changing rapidly as the glacier receded from the continent. Those changes alone would stress animal populations. New species from Asia may have increased competition for food, or may have introduced diseases. Humans may have been another factor in the ecological reorganization.

When McNeil inventoried and analyzed the fossil trackways, comparing information about movement and size of the ancient animals with data from tracks made by modern elephant herds, he found some evidence that the herds visiting the reservoir site 11,000 years ago were stressed.
“The ratio of young animals to adults was far below what we would consider healthy levels in modern populations of similar animals,” he says. “This site captures this one brief moment in time and tells us something was definitely happening.”

The magnitude of the site is the way that it is letting us see how these animals interacted with their environment, with each other, and with early humans.

excerpted from: Reading the Rocks: A Biography of Ancient Alberta

(From October 2009)

I had visions of a scene of scarcely controlled panic; gendarmes racing into the Gare de Lyon, dressed in black, with bullet-proof face guards and helmets, barricading platform H (“’ashe”) with a phalanx of machine-gun–toting, shorn-haired, black-clad toughs legitimized solely by badges of state-approved authority and the smell of café espresse and camembert on their breath. La Sécurité (avec deux accents égouts) sending in a bomb team with dogs and defusers, and the entire station being placed under arrest. Everything brought to a standstill. Just like Paris under a transit strike. Or a health-care workers’ strike. Or a container-truckers’ strike. Or a taxi-drivers’ strike.

That, at least, might explain the utter dearth of taxis in all of Paris when we disembarked and most needed one.

But Gaston assures me that, no, the discerning French nose does not need a dog trained to explosives to recognize fine cheese, finer olives, and the other fine points and opportunities in life.

+++++++

Gaston, being a guy, is stoic and never cries—at least in any way that would be readily recognizable by a normal and normally sensitive human being or other mammal or even by an alien or reptile or microorganism.

But the result of our trip from Montpellier to Paris, even now, a full month after that fateful day, brings a suspicious mistiness to Gaston’s eyes and a tell-tale cherry-red runniness to his nose. And it’s not H1N1.

No.

Gaston likes his olives. Every Friday at home, charged with acquiring the week’s groceries as his contribution to household expenses, he returns from the local grocery store with a tubful of green-olives-stuffed-with-hot-pimentos or -whatever. ‘Whatever,” because I’m not especially into olives, so experience his weekly pickings only in how they take up valuable fridge space that could be used to house something far more essential—like humous or organic lettuces or home-made soup stock or ratatouille.

However, once or twice or thrice or more a day whilst it lasts, Gaston visits his fridge-stashed cache for an olive fix. He fills a specifically shaped bowl (not so large as to diminish their contents; not so small as to deprive him satisfaction of his craving) with the little green jewels and with pickled onions (another item of which I beg leave to have only a passing—a very passing by—olfactory experience), sits on the sofa and savours the flavours, smacking and snorting and chomping in his own private ritual of appreciation and appetite.

Thus, Gaston was very happy in France. Particularly so once we discovered the markets.

We would park our rental car in an unknown town listed as having a public “marché (accent égout) traditionnel” on the day in question and wander aimlessly until we spotted empty baskets moving ever further off ahead of us on the street on the arms of French madames and, eventually, full market baskets making their way towards us on the arms of other said French madames. In this way would we find our way to the town/village marketplace.

And, once in the environs of said marketplaces, Gaston’s finely tuned and highly sensitive olive detector would deploy, much in the way the Pentagon’s satellite dishes trackg terrorist cell-phone conversations, or a mule deer’s ears follow possible sounds-of-concern while it goes about its browsing-and-pooping business. Within moments, he would locate and plot the locations of the various and sometimes multitude local olive vendors…. And pass by, following in my wake, as I, a veritable French madame myself with my own woven-grass basket over my arm, beelined to the produce sellers and the cheese vendors and the sausage vendors, but looking archly out of the corner of his eye at the wares. (—Who am I kidding? That’s far too subtle for Gaston: he would rubber-neck and stare, imitating the aforementioned Pentagon satellite dishes and mule-deer ears—and drool!) We might pass by two or three times to compare prices of lettuce, of green beans, of fresh basil….

And then, bowing to the inevitable and the interests of maritable longevity, I would stop and turn to him: “How’s your supply?”

“I could do with a few more.”

And so it would begin, yet again, once again….

I ate more olives proffered by vendors in markets in France than cumulatively through the previous four decades: the latest year’s (meaning the year before’s, as the olive harvest occurs in November/December) own green olives preserved with fresh minced garlic—sure to ward off any popish, anti-paratge, anti-Cathar vampire; preserved with lemon—sure to preserve any vampire of any faith until… well, forever; preserved with hot pimento, sure to bring to mind every morning exactly where those pimentos originated after Christophe Colon’s discovery and explorations of the world’s ring of fire; preserved with sweet pimento, sure to… I’m not sure what; preserved with basil and bay; preserved with … whatever! And of course an entire selection of black olives, preserved in various and imaginative and surprisingly tasty ways…. Who knew?

We would stagger back to the car, the basket over my arm and a couple of plastic bags hanging from Gaston’s hands laden with vegetables, herbs, leafy greens, fresh bread, cheese, sausages and, to Gaston’s eager anticipation, at least four varieties of olives, and our stomachs laden with bits and pieces of almost all of the above.

Who needs lunch? Or supper, for that matter.

And, in the days following, we (read: I) would endure the familiar olive ritual, sometimes accompanied by the very fine local plonk fine du terroir or plonck finer de pays or plonck particularly vignoble (each and all for less than 5 euros per), sometimes by Belgian brew selected by Gaston at the local Carrefour or Super U, but always, always with a reverence not seen in Canada—ever.

He had a goodly supply remaining when we left the south for Paris. It was packed individually in a bag with a supply of brie, camembert and a couple of chèvres intended for lunch on the train and days of enjoyment thereafter.

And we did enjoy our lunch, leisurely, because what else were we going to do on the train? Other than watch the landscape unfold, 16th-century chateau upon chateau, 12th-century fortress upon fortress, field upon field, vineyard upon vineyard, wood upon wood, hilltop bastide upon hilltop bastide. Gaston especially reveled in his oleai europaeai and his stinky cheeses. When he had finally finished (“had finished,” as in the French—not “was finished,” meaning dead; “had full,” not “was full,” meaning preggies), he folded them back into the bag, which he then carefully and reverentially placed in the rack above our seats.

“That was a very enjoyable repast.”

Then: “Remind me not to forget these.”

The last time Gaston said, “Remind me not to forget…” to me when we were traveling was en route from Surabaya to Kuta in Indonesia. He had written notes in his journal (isn’t that quaint?) not particularly complimentary about some of the people and situations we had recently encountered and stuck it in the pocket in the seat ahead of him on the airplane, on which we were flying instead of taking the bus and ferry that sank with 600-some overloaded passengers aboard that same day.

And, frankly, I—and it is all about me, after all—don’t see why he doesn’t just learn to put things away where they belong right away, because he always, always forgets, and I have other things on my mind than to remind him to gather up his toys, journals, whatever (“whatever!”), and so we experience unnecessary pain/regret/apologies and a complete waste of emotion and energy. I have, finally after two decades years, come to accept that what Gaston does/says/thinks/doesn’t do/say/think is entirely his responsibility and nothing whatsoever (“whatsoever,” not “whatever!”) to do with me (even though everything else is, of course, all about me).

And so the train pulls into the Gare de Lyon—finally and after the scheduled, but still too long (if you regret leaving where you’re leaving and have difficulty sitting still for 1.5 hours, let along for), 3.5 hours—and we gather our suitcases and backpacks and our market basket full of preciously fragile (“L’argile, c’est fragile,”) Provencal pottery unlike any other you’ve ever seen anywhere—anywhere!,—and disembark among the hordes to take a taxi to our appointed (definitely not anointed) apartment, and find no taxis in service in all of Paris and so have to walk \six kilometres with wine bottle-stuffed luggage and basket of pottery through crowded, cobbled, disgustingly smelly, litter-scattered, people-clogged (did I mention crowded? Let me repeat: storefront-to-storefront-packed), sunny, gloriously warm, late-afternoon-Saturday streets (especially once we entered the Marais, the recently funkified fashion district where our apartment was located).

It wasn’t until the evening following, as I tried to prepare our evening meal in a ridiculously small kitchen with no counterspace whatsoever and refrigerator one-quarter the size of the average North American bar fridge, that the tragedy made itself unescapably, undeniably, and oh-so-heartbreakingly (to Gaston) known.

“This is going to take a while,” I said, pushing sweaty hair out of my eyes, trying to salvage a Spanish risotto burnt on the gas burner that operated at only very high or barely on, stirring the reduced tomato sauce on the one burner that did work, and trying not to shriek in frustration, rage and … whatever! “Why don’t you have some cheese and olives while I get this under control?”

“I can’t find them.”

“???”

“I think we left them on the train.”

“——. We?!”

“I could cry.”

“——”

“——”

“You left them on the train?!!”

“I’ve looked all over and through everything for them.”

“I did, too. Actually. I thought you might have them stashed somewhere”

“I wish. But I’m afraid the worst has come to pass: They were left behind. And I could just weep.”

And me, ever sympathetic in moment of crisis: “My god. An unidentifiable package on the TGV. After the Metro bombings and Spain and 9/11, they’d declare a national state of emergency…”

And so Gaston held forth, in the strong, masculine, stoic Way of the Guy, on his theory of the discerning nose of the SNCF-employed Frenchman, capable of sniffing out quality cheese and excellent olives whenever any of those presented themselves.

And, all the while, something suspiciously like a tear trembled and caught the light in the corner of his eye.

 

Disclaimer:

Events in this report may appear larger than they actually were in reality.

 

 

 

 

montsegur pog, France, by SMair

Montségur fortress sits atop the mountain pog. It’s a steep climb up to see the remains.

When you greet people here in the deep south of France, they reply to your “Bonjour” with what sounds like “Bonjeu.” Good game. Not the Sorbonne-approved elocution Mme Abdel-Kadar required of me and my classmates those many years ago, but an appropriate greeting to a person on vacation.

We’ve been seeing a fair amount of bilingual signage lately: The regular French, and also the Occitan equivalent. For instance, in Belloc, a village near our country rental, the blue sign at the turn to the Mairie says rue de l’Occitane; the red sign right below says roux de l’Occitanie. The name Belloc is also Occitan; in French—and apparently 700 years ago after the French overran the region—it was Beaulieu. In fact, any village name you encounter in the south that ends in oc or ac or ec has Occitan origins. Including Lautrec or Salazac…

The word for peak—as in mountain peak—is the delightful sounding pog.

A few days ago, Gaston and I slogged up the pog at Montségur (translation: Mount Secure) to look at what’s left of the fortress. Not much: the lower bit of the original keep, some walls where the medieval village had clung to the slope, and the curtain walls (called pregnant walls in French: murs enceinte—which rerouted my translating neurons to “retaining walls” for a number of days, for the obvious symptom connection. Pregnant pause… okay, never mind.). Hard to believe 600 people lived there—even if there had been multiple floors on which to stack them all.

view from Montsegur, France

The Cathars would have seen French troops approach from miles away.

And a long way to go for fresh water.

But the view is spectacular: they would have seen those Catholic hordes coming from miles up the valleys around.

On the way down (“Bonjour,” “Bonjour;” “Bonjeu;” “Bonjeu”), we passed the tortured faces going uphill of all those French people who supposedly never formally exercise, doing their patrimoinic duty.

The site is close to the pilgrim way through the south to Santiago di Compostela, and is something of a pilgrim site in its own right. The last Cathar fortress to stand against the Catholic and French hordes, it withstood a months-long siege by some 10,000 troops. In March 1244, the Cathars surrendered. Approximately 220 were burned en masse in a bonfire at the foot of the peak when they refused to renounce their faith.

Approaching the fortress of Montsegur, France

The forbidding final approach to the fortress.

St-Dominique sign Fanjeaux

Saint Dominque habita ici de 1206 a 1215

Carved into the wall beside the front door of Fanjeaux’s abbey is the announcement: St-Dominique habita ici de 1206 à 1215. Dominic (or Domenge, if you prefer the Occitan language) came to tour the region at the behest of the pope, bringing his warm and personal touch to interrogating and torturing Cathar heretics as part of the Inquisition—initiated when the military end of the Albigensian Crusade seemed to French king and RC pope to be taking too long. With the good saint’s assistance, the process quickened significantly, and the Cathars disappeared: through a combination of being forcefully converted to Rome-approved doctrine, slaughtered, burned alive at the stake, or made to take part in other block-party events arranged specially for them.

Ah, yes, the good ol’ days, when personal belief and expression were mandated by politics. (Oh, wait, that’s today, too!)

Walking up the rue du Chateau, in Foix, France

Walking up the rue du Château, Foix, France

Historically significant persons are frequently commemorated this way in France. Small signs may appear on the corners of buildings in Paris, alerting those who stop and read that such-and-such a member of the Resistance was shot by German authorities in the vicinity, or that some painterly bon vivant or other starved in the garrett there, or that a particular literary sage wrote his first poems/essays/novel at the corner table in that cafe.

Contrast those announcements with the plaque on a house on Foix’s rue du Château: Ici, Gaston Fébus n’habitait pas. Gaston Fébus did not live here.

Instead, Gaston Phoebus—or more to the point—Gaston the FABULOUS!, comte of Foix and Béarn, lived for a short time up the hill in the chateau—a curious, imposing, three-towered pile of stone looming over the town.

Foix chateau looms

It would have been difficult to escape the feeling of being watched in the town of Foix when the chateau was occupied.

The old boy had quite an opinion of himself, fancied himself a poet and musician, as well as God’s gift in the physical looks department. Think Hank VIII with fewer wives. In keeping with the commemoration theme, one would think good ol’ Gasser would have personally placed a commemorative plaque on the exterior wall of his own chateau, at the very least. But, as with so many people who have to resort to PR personnel and marketing specialists to convince the world of their superior personal qualities (something St-Dominic didn’t bother with, but then he had all of Rome, a couple of armies and – oh, yes – a few burning stakes behind him to convince the populace of his charms), Mr. FABULOUS! was a tad insecure. He may not have had Hank VIII’s marital problems, but he did have his own share of family issues. These, he resolved as Henry would do 150 years later—simply by doing away with them: brothers, sons, etc. (Alas, my love, you do me wrong…)

Mr FABULOUS! and his surviving relatives decamped from Foix, part of the kingdom of France since the Albigensian crusade, to Béarn, then still an independent state, to pretend they too were still independent of the various French kings Louis. His fancy castle on the hill became a prison at about the time of the French Revolution. This is why the buildings and towers survived, with new wall decorations in the form of graffiti, and stylish grillwork over the windows to keep the burglars out—or in, as the case may be.

Antique window grills to keep prisoners in, Foix chateau, France

The castle became a prison after the French Revolution. Security was a problem even then.

orca off southern Vancouver Island, by Thomas Forster

Canadian Geographic, July 2009

A black Labrador retriever named Tucker is helping researchers determine why orcas summering off southern Vancouver Island are dying.

Tucker lends his nose to science by standing in a moving open-decked motorboat and sniffing the wind to detect orca scat floating on the surface of the Strait of Georgia and Haro Strait. His human colleagues, including Sam Wasser, director of the University of Washington’s Centre for Conservation Biology, scoop of the greenish brown goo and later analyze its hormone levels.

“Killer whale scat doesn’t stay afloat long, and it’s about the same colour as the water,” says Wasser, who uses dogs to study elephants, caribou, spotted owls and other at-risk species. “Without a dog, we’d have a hard time getting enough samples.”

Because Tucker can smell the poop from a long way off, the researchers needn’t crowd the whales. Preliminary analysis of hormones in the scat suggests that boat traffic stresses orcas.

The results from samples collected since 2006 also indicate the whales’ preference for Chinook salmon may be causing them to starve. Stress hormones in the scat peak and thyroid hormones plummet from September through December, when the salmon are at their scarcest. Thyroid hormones help regulate metabolism. When an animal starves, levels drop and metabolism slows. Wasser says the hormone levels mirror observed orca death rates.

“In 2007, thyroid levels in the samples were highest, and no whales died. They were intermediate in 2006, when there was five percent mortality, and lowest in 2008, when mortality decreased to eight percent.”

More samples are needed to confirm the results. Wasser and Tucker will return to the straits to patrol for poop this summer.

History Mystery: Serving Mallet quiz

From 2004–2010, I edited the Maritime Museum of B.C.’s member newsletter, Waterlines, and annual journal, Resolution. B.C. Magazine approached me at that time to submit a piece about any strange and unlikely artifact from the museum’s collection for the magazine’s History Mystery quiz column.

History Mystery solved: Serving Mallet quiz

Information Forestry, August 2008—Orbiting the Earth more than 700 kilometres above Canada’s forests, a set of satellite-borne sensors collects data from the light reflecting off the planet’s surface.

Beneath the canopy of an eastern Ontario woodland, a Blackburnian Warbler prepares to fly south for the winter.

Linking these two phenomena is Biodiversity Monitoring from Space, or BioSpace, a Natural Resources Canada-led project that uses satellite-derived data to track key indicators of biological diversity over time.

BioSpace is the first system of its kind in Canada to use Earth observation data to monitor biodiversity over large areas in a systematic and repeatable manner. Its developers hope it will come to serve as an early warning system to alert governments and resource managers to critical habitat losses and areas with potential species at risk in even the most remote, inaccessible regions of the country.

“Most of the current work used to characterize biodiversity in Canada is very detailed and locally specific, and usually involves someone going out into the field and inventorying specific species,” says project leader Mike Wulder, a research scientist with Natural Resources Canada. “With BioSpace, we’re exploring the big picture: can we use Earth observation data from space to characterize national trends in biodiversity and identify locations where changes in certain conditions may indicate changes in biodiversity?”

BioSpace monitors four key indicators of biodiversity on the landscape, at one-kilometre spatial resolution. Topography drives climate. Land cover indicates types of cover (both vegetated and non-vegetated) and their spatial arrangement. The dynamic habitat index incorporates measures of annual vegetation productivity or greenness, amount of snow cover in winter, and seasonal variation in landscape greenness (an indication of when food is available). The fourth indicator is disturbance of land cover over time.

The BioSpace team recently compared indicator-based predictions of biodiversity to field data collected for birds, such as the Blackburnian Warbler, by the Ontario Breeding Bird Survey and on butterflies in the northeastern U.S.

“Land cover and seasonality are the two remotely sensed indicators that explain most variations in species richness for these two groups,” says Nicholas Coops, University of British Columbia Associate Professor of Forest Resources Management, Canada Research Chair in Remote Sensing, and a member of the BioSpace team. “Birds and butterflies like edge environments: they might live in one habitat, breed in another, and feed in a third. If you’re interested in using BioSpace to monitor the status of bird populations, you would focus on these two indices.”

“It’s very expensive to go out and monitor every single species at risk,” says Natural Resources Canada Biodiversity Science Advisor Brenda McAfee. “We don’t have the resources to do that even in the regions that have roads and easy access, let alone in remote regions of the country that have no roads or transportation infrastructure.” BioSpace, she says, would permit her group to report on biodiversity on an ecosystem or landscape level anywhere in Canada. Agreements requiring reports on biodiversity include the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Montreal Protocol’s Criteria and Indicators of Sustainable Forest Management, the Canadian Biodiversity Strategy, and the National Forest Inventory.

In addition, information generated from BioSpace allows researchers and natural resource managers to prioritize field sampling. “BioSpace is not a substitute for field sampling,” says Wulder. “You have to have boots on the ground in order to actually inventory the species and conditions.” BioSpace may facilitate allocation of scarce resources for detailed field studies and species-at-risk conservation.

BioSpace is supported by the Government Related Initiatives Program (GRIP) of the Canadian Space Agency.

“The development of a Canadian dynamic habitat index using multi-temporal satellite estimates of canopy light absorbance” and “Development of a large area biodiversity monitoring system drive by remote sensing” can be ordered from the Canadian Forest Service online bookstore.

Captions:

From the Cover: ist2_3765025-blackburnian-warbler-with-insect: Fragmented forests and woodlands make for important bird and butterfly habitat, according to a recent comparison of indicator-based predictions of biodiversity to field data. credit: © Paul Tessier, istock 2007

 

© Natural Resources Canada