The ABMI Alberta-wide Wetland Inventory aims to complement the regional strengths of the AMWI by considering the entire province at once. It uses a consistent, remotely-sensed topographical approach from border to border, while remaining sensitive to important regional distinctions.
The ABMI Alberta-wide Wetland Inventory uses open-access Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 data in Google Earth Engine combined with machine learning to classify marshes, swamps, bogs, fens, open water, and upland areas for all of Alberta.
Within this standardized approach, the ABMI Alberta-wide Wetland Inventory also recognizes that Alberta is a diverse province with distinct regional types of wetlands. With that in mind, we divided the province into three areas, each with optimizations to capture the area’s unique spatial and temporal wetland patterns:
- the boreal and foothills (characterized by large peatland and swamp complexes)
- the prairies (where wetlands usually occur in small seasonal potholes)
- the Rocky Mountains (where wetlands are constrained to narrow valleys)