Monitoring the Recovery of Human Footprint

The Human Footprint Inventory (HFI) provides comprehensive information on the location and size of human footprint features in Alberta. However, any recovery or regeneration on “temporary” footprints, such as harvest areas, is not currently incorporated into the HFI. Thus, work is ongoing to enhance human footprint data with additional information reflecting the dynamic nature of features where vegetation will regrow. Such information can provide broad-scale patterns of regeneration and regional variability, or could offer users a mechanism for the custom removal of footprint features from their maps or analyses that they consider “recovered”. Our publicly available Harvest Area Spectral Regeneration datasets include spectral regeneration information for Human Footprint Inventory harvest area polygons, where suitable (Hird et al., 2021).

The spectral regeneration visualization tool caught the attention of Forest Matters, a community-led citizen science group. They realized it was a perfect fit for their Ecological Recovery Project, which uses citizen observations to track the ecological recovery of local human footprints such as harvest areas. Forest Matters used the visualization tool to look at patterns of forest harvest over time, and then use this information to select ground data collection sites that cover varying ages or stages of spectral regeneration. 

Once selected, survey sites were visited in person by members of Forest Matters, who collected a wide range of data on things like species presence, woody debris, tree age, and more, all based on rigorous methods that are rooted in scientific best practice. This kind of information should help to paint a more complete picture of what regenerating forests look like, and how conditions on the ground relate to what we can see from space.

As the ERP continues to collect data, the information can hopefully feed back into our understandings of recovery and how its captured in future information products.

Building on the workflow developed for forest harvest area spectral regeneration, the Geospatial Centre has been working to apply these methods to other types of human footprint features. Spectral regeneration refers to the return of spectral signals—the reflectance of light from Earth’s surfaces—to pre-disturbance conditions, indicating the regrowth and increasing complexity of vegetation.

We have been focused on regeneration on wellsite and reclaimed mine features in an area surrounding the Athabasca Oil Sands (see study area map) found in the ABMI’s Human Footprint Inventory (HFI). This work is preliminary, but it shows the potential for developing remote sensing-based metrics of regeneration for other human footprint features.