1 Summary

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.

1.1 Supporting Information

This repository contains the R code (src/) required for reproducing the results presented on . 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. This data layer can be found on the Government of Alberta’s GeoDiscover Alberta platform. Technical documentation describing the methodology and underlying data layers for this indicator can also be found on GeoDiscover Alberta.

1.2 Acknowledgement

We would like to acknowledge that this work would not be possible without the dedication of staff from both the Government of Alberta and ABMI.

1.3 Suggested citation

Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute. 2024. Development of the Native Cover indicator for Alberta. Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute, Alberta, Canada. (https://abbiodiversity.github.io/NativeCover/)

1.4 Contact

All questions related to this document, acquiring raw data, or the available scripts, please contact Brandon Allen ().