Shannon White is a biodiversity specialist at the Government of Alberta, and ecologist with the Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute (ABMI). She talks about the importance of ecosystem services – benefits that nature provides to humans for free – and the current project she is working on for ABMI.
We currently don’t know the value of the rangeland services in existence in Alberta. ABMI’s newest project is currently working to fill this knowledge gap. The goal is to develop a system to assess and map ecosystem services across Alberta to better understand how planning and management decisions affect the landscape, and increase benefits to Albertans. This mapping will be open sourced and available to everyone.
This project will help people determine how much different ecosystems services are worth to humans and the environment, and what the trade-offs are when we make one land development choice instead of another. This presentation was part of the Red Deer Watershed Alliance's Forum and AGM, in June 2014, in Red Deer, Alberta.
