University of Lethbridge professor takes to the skies for cross-country research mission

LETHBRIDGE – One of the country’s top 100 greatest explorers, as ranked by Canadian Geographic in 2015, is planning his next adventure.

Dr. Chris Hopkinson, the University of Lethbridge geography professor, will be taking to the skies to conduct surveys about the environment that could provide game-changing information.

Hopkinson and Dr. Laura Chasmer, Hopkinson’s wife and colleague at the university, will conduct the surveys from a plane equipped with state-of-the-art technology.

The duo is determined to study the ins and outs of Canada’s ecosystems, including forests, water resources and wetlands, as well as the effects of climate change, such as flood hazards and permafrost loss.

“While the mission has many partners and several individual objectives associated with each site, my overarching goal is to assist with documenting and understanding landscape changes at a very high resolution, over multiple Canadian ecozones, as well as the processes driving those changes” Hopkinson said.

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“We’ve been doing these kind of trans-Canadian airborne survey missions since 2000, but this year is special because the technology we are using is paradigm-shifting in the way it collects data.”

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The pair will kick off their cross-country journey at the end of July, beginning with Ontario. They’ll repeat former surveys in northern Ontario and Manitoba, parts of Saskatchewan and the Peace-Athabasca delta in Alberta. They’ll then conduct surveys in the Northwest Territories, including areas near Yellowknife, Fort Smith, Norman Wells and Fort Simpson.

The team will then return to Alberta for the last leg of the trip, which includes surveys near Fort McMurray, Slave Lake, Calgary, the Castle Mountain watershed, Lethbridge, the Oldman River, and finally the Cypress Hills.

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Hopkinson’s study will use a technology called LiDAR, a light detecting and ranging system that emits laser light pulses to create three-dimensional topographical maps.

The data collected will be especially useful for government agencies, by informing their plans and policies for areas of science including, carbon accounting, wildlife habitat management, greenhouse gas strategies and timber productivity.

While LiDAR has existed for several decades, new multi-spectral sensors provide even more opportunities to yield exclusive data in engineering and mapping. The equipment is capable of mapping the earth’s surface in three dimensions, varying in resolutions from 10 to 20 centimetres.

Hopkinson believes the modern developments to the technology, will have a seismic impact on the way research is conducted.

“With the new technology, which is only recently on the market, we can do all the could 3D things we used to do with traditional LiDAR, but now we collect more surface property information and this allows us to do new things like tree species mapping, which was always kind of hard to do in the past.”

“This system allows us to see the world in a whole new way.”