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Fall 2012

Newsletter Archive

 

Highway Wilding Mapping Project Wins Award

 
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This year we have seen some exciting new additions to our Highway Wilding website, including a series of interactive maps created by Jon Ball, a resident of Banff. Jon has been helping Highway Wilding for the last few years by monitoring the wildlife crossing structures (WCS) in Banff National Park, as well as by classifying the photos taken by our motion-activated cameras.

"Every once in a while, when classifying the images that we get from the WCS, we come across a photo that is strikingly dramatic and shows a view of the wildlife in Banff that one would very rarely get to see otherwise," says Jon. "I realised that we have a remarkable archive of such pictures, and wanted to put some of these together and present them to a wider audience, whilst getting the word out about Highway Wilding and what it is that we do."

Jon made Highway Wilding the subject of the final project for his GIS degree at SAIT, and we are lucky enough to share the results with you. "Using the interactive mapping products allowed me to show the relationship between these images and the locations at which they were obtained: always within a few metres of the TransCanada Highway, which is remarkable. I enjoyed putting these maps together as an outreach tool for Highway Wilding and the work that we do."

The main interactive map - which won 1st place in the web maps class of the map gallery at this year's GeoAlberta conference - can be viewed here , and this map contains links to Google Earth maps and other views of our images and data: just click on 'About this map' in the top-right hand corner.

Jon has now finished his GIS training at SAIT and is currently working part-time as a GIS Technician for the Town of Cochrane.

Photo credit: HighwayWilding.org