Alberta Tomorrow Presentation

Yesterday, we had a presentation from Jennifer on the website: Alberta Tomorrow. This website shows us how Alberta's land has changed over time, what we use it for, and makes projections for the future. 

In this picture, Jennifer is teaching us about Alberta's regions.
There are 6: Grasslands, Parklands, Foothills, Rocky Mountains, Canadian Shield and Boreal Forest

 

Here we are looking at Alberta historically. That means, we could see all of the changes that had happened to Alberta's land in the past. For example, in 1910, you can see a lot of yellow on the map. Yellow represents Grasslands. In the second picture, the yellow has been replaced by purple and orange-pink, which are cities and agriculture (farming).

1910

2018

The website has a simulator. You can adjust different measures and see how they will affect the land over time. For example, we might see our natural landscape to be less, grizzly habitats reduce, and we use a lot of water. BUT the future can change! We were able to explore the simulator and change the type of landscape (planting trees), and management practices which all impacted the future results.

"I liked that we get to change our future. We can change it so it is nice instead of bad." ~ Asma

"It was interesting that we could see what happened in the past and what changes happened from 1910 to 2020. We could write what we could do in the future and it would tell us if that is going to happen depending on what Alberta is like right now." ~ Zoya

"I liked that we could explore different places in Alberta and find out what the past was." ~ Olivia

"I learned that it's impossible to have green dots (achieve your land goals) because when I plant a few forests, after 10 years, it became grasslands because people cut the trees down." ~ EA

"I liked how if we could possibly remember our password, we could go home and do it at home." ~ Yulia

"I was worried that the land of Alberta will be super bad." ~ AN

"When me and Y were working together, we had this huge area that we found that was all red (farms). I'm really worried about that." ~ HR

"I learned that we were not taking care of the earth after the Indigenous people were here." ~ Thanve

"I was really surprised when the bear habitats were at zero percent in the Bow River watershed." ~ Oscar