The ABMI’s core biodiversity monitoring program tracks changes in groups of common plants and animals to understand how their populations might be changing over time. We also measure a variety of habitat characteristics and determine how our human footprint is changing over time, to identify relationships between human land use, habitat, and species abundance, when and where they exist.

But the core biodiversity monitoring program isn’t optimized for tracking changes in the populations of species that are rare or elusive—these species often aren’t fully captured by our core monitoring efforts. The ABMI’s Rare Animals project was designed to address this gap.

The project was originally conceived and initiated through the Ecological Monitoring Committee for the Lower Athabasca (EMCLA). The EMCLA, a consortium of oil sands companies, government ministries, and agencies coordinated by the ABMI, was established in 2010 with the goal of designing cost-efficient protocols to monitor rare and elusive vocalizing species—species that make sounds.

The project is focused on several vocalizing species: owls, amphibians, and a secretive marsh bird, the Yellow Rail, which is a species of Special Concern in Canada. The overall aim of the monitoring program is to understand these species’ statuses, habitat preferences, and distributions across the Lower Athabasca region. 

>> To read more about our approach, visit our Rare Animals Project page.