A changing land, geotracking and Canada’s Ocean Supercluster

Track record

These days, about 90 per cent of Canadians have a smartphone (the figure is over 97 per cent for those under 45, according to Statistics Canada). We’ve quickly grown accustomed to neighbourhood-specific weather alerts, to real-time traffic guidance, and to being able to instantly pull up a list of moderately priced, kid-friendly restaurants within walking distance of wherever we happen to be. The feeling, and perhaps even the very concept of being lost, is fading from our collective consciousness. And yet we’re just beginning to grasp the power and capabilities of universal geotracking.

Our devices, and the services we use them to access, don't just know where we are. They know where we’ve been, and where everyone else is and what people who go to the places we’ve been to are likely to do next.

Read more.

Encouraging tech innovations to safeguard ocean health

For millennia, people have perceived the ocean as endlessly bountiful. Owned by none. Teeming with life. Ours for the taking.

But during the past couple of decades, that narrative of inexhaustibility has been upended. The biggest fish are fished out. Sharks are becoming rare. Many marine mammals are on the brink. Even plankton populations are shifting and thinning out.

And at the same time, the very chemistry of the global ocean is changing, driven by the growing carbon load in the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels. The ocean is warming up, losing its oxygen and acidifying.

Read the first in our six-part series from Alanna Mitchell.

A changing land

We can tell a lot about how the world changes with land cover change maps, the 2010-2015 update of which was published in November 2020 by the North American Land Change Monitoring System.

These maps tell a story of a changing world, with major events altering the landscape. The large areas around Yellowknife depict land cover transition from forest to mainly grassland and barren lands, thanks to the 2014 forest fires in the surrounding area. Unusually warm conditions and lack of rain triggered more than 130 forest fires in the Great Slave Lake region in the Northwest Territories. The forest fire season for that year has been classified as one of the most extreme in the region over the last three decades, with lasting impacts on vegetation and wildlife as well as human populations.

The maps, created from a composite of images assembled from satellite observations at a 30-metre spatial resolution, are the result of a collaborative effort that harmonized land cover classification systems from Canada, Mexico and the United States — no small feat, according to the team working on the project.

Read more.

GeoIgnite 2021: Canada's National Geospatial Conference

GeoIgnite 2021 is back April 21-23, and Canada’s National Geospatial Conference is bigger and better than ever. Breaking new ground, the conference is free and the first three days are presented bilingually in French and English for the first time.

With the theme “Leadership and Geospatial Intelligence,” the conference continues to be the platform for conversations and discussion on the future of Canada’s location and technology sector.

The event is free for all Canadian geo enthusiasts. Grab your tickets now!

RCGS-funded expeditions take on peaks, rivers and trails across Canada

Few RCGS-funded expeditions took place last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but many explorers found a way to safely head afield in 2021

See what's happening this year.

Forward

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