If industry contributes to the endangerment of a species that falls below these benchmarks, the Government of Alberta can order remedial action.
[8] A team of more that 20 scientists identified protocols to survey a broad diversity of biota, habitat structures, vegetation communities, and landscapes patterns within Alberta.
These protocols have been reviewed by other scientists from across North America and have been amalgamated into an integrated design that will effectively and efficiently survey all elements.
The ABMP is designed to monitor long-term, broad-scale changes in biodiversity, many of which are anticipated to be difficult to detect because they occur slowly over time.
Information and analyses generated from the ABMP will be used to delineate potential causal relationships between development events and changes in biodiversity.
Scientists involved in the research included "Dan Farr, Chris Shank, Rich Moses, Stan Boutin, Erin Bayne (vertebrates), Phil Lee, Steve Hanus (forest structure and vascular plants), Jennifer Doubt, Rene Belland (mosses), Anna-Liisa Sippola, Jogeir Stokland (fungi), Neville Winchester, Bert Finnamore, Jeff Battigelli, Heather Proctor (arthropods), and others.
"[9] Jim Schieck, Chris Shank and Dan Farr combined these protocols into an integrated suite "designed to be cost effective and capable of monitoring a diversity of biota, over broad spatial scales and long time periods.
"[3] By February 2012 although the ABMI was "identified as a key component of the Joint Canada-Alberta Monitoring Plan and has many strong elements – scientific leadership, publicly accessible information, and value-neutral result presentation" the Institute had not secured full funding which limited "its ability to deliver sound monitoring data.
What the ABMI provides, for the first time, is a meaningful metric of environmental impact or biodiversity performance that governments could use to inform decision making."
[12] According to the Pembina Institute blog, "The ABMI is identified as a key component of the Joint Canada-Alberta Monitoring Plan and has many strong elements – scientific leadership, publicly accessible information, and value-neutral result presentation.
Standardized sampling protocols will be used to cover a broad range of species and habitat elements within terrestrial and aquatic environments, as well as broader landscape-level features.According to Cathy Olesen MP,[11]: 511 The biodiversity and, therefore, the health of over 2,000 species is assessed by the changes in habitats and human land use through a cumulative effects approach.
The next time around when a site gets re-examined, it is done within a week's window to reduce any seasonal variability.Researchers from ABMI and the University of Alberta using the oil sands industry of Alberta as case study in their paper in which they challenged the economic prudence of the costly equivalency-based biodiversity offset systems by using ABMI's "empirically derived index of biodiversity intactness to link offsets with losses incurred by development.
Typical forms of biodiversity offsets include land protection, restoration, or enhancement, and they are typically applied to achieve no net loss of a particular biodiversity feature.According to the 2014 ABMI report all six herds of caribou including the threatened boreal and the endangered mountain caribou "have suffered annual rates of decline ranging from 4.6% to 15.2% from 1993 to 2012" in the oil sands region (OSR) as oil and gas production booms in northern Alberta.
In an article in The Wall Street Journal, Dawson observed that, "The report comes amid controversy over Alberta's recent sales of oil and gas development leases in areas populated by both boreal and mountain caribou.