These data were created to provide open and free datasets depicting prevalent and accurate delineation of surficial human disturbances in Alberta to stakeholders; foreseeably utilized in research, land use management and regional planning, trend analysis, and general interest.

Effective management of human footprint requires a reliable and credible system for monitoring and reporting. The ABMI has been reporting on human footprint since 2007, and beginning in 2015, has been working in collaboration with the Government of Alberta as part of the Alberta Human Footprint Monitoring Program (AHFMP) to improve the accuracy of human footprint. For the ABMI 2014 wall-to-wall human footprint inventory, the base layers produced through the AHFMP were used by the ABMI to update four Human Footprint (HF) categories: roads, rails, well sites, and seismic lines. Continued annual updates of this product along with the sample-based human footprint trend data include many categories beyond these original four (e.g. cultivation, industrial and mine trips, pipelines, residential areas, etc.) Both of these HF products are used to report on the amount, type, and distribution of different human footprint categories in the province through time. See the ABMI's latest State of Human Footprint in Alberta report here (add link to: https://abmi.ca/home/reports/2022/human-footprint). 

At the provincial scale, the ABMI consolidates up to 21 human footprint categories (based on more than 90 anthropogenic disturbance types) into a single integrated dataset by applying a specific order of precedence to create the ABMI Human Footprint Inventory (see the HFI 2021 Metadata document). Datasets are currently publicly available for these years: 2010, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021.

The most up to date and preeminent Human Footprint Inventory 2021 (HFI 2021) dataset was developed in part by a collaborative effort of data accumulation between the Government of Alberta and the ABMI, together forming the Alberta Human Footprint Monitoring Program (AHFMP) to better enhance and update human footprint data in Alberta. Going forward, all human footprint data and information produced by the AHFMP will be made available online in a single authoritative data sharing format. These efforts are incorporated into the leading development of techniques in interpretation and delineation that supersede previous technical approaches made by the ABMI.

The 2010 Version 1 dataset was retroactively re-constructed based on the HFI 2014 dataset’s improved data collection and delineation techniques. However, due to data licensing issues, this dataset no longer offers  information on pipelines. Nevertheless, the HFI 2010 Version 2 has been retroactively re-constructed using more recent data , and does include pipeline information. The 2010 Human Footprint Inventory will be an integral part of a decadal collection of datasets (e.g., 2010, 2020, 2030, and etc.) for future human footprint trend analysis and will be updated collectively henceforth.