Mountain Legacy Project Report on the Mountain Legacy Project Alberta Environment and Sustainable Resources Management | April 2014 Overview The Mountain Legacy Project (MLP) is the world’s largest systematic repeat photography project. Since 2006 Alberta Environment and Sustainable Resources Development has invested in the success of this project, and this support has been decisive in digitizing and repeating more than 3,500 high resolution images along the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains, providing critical historical and change data for on-the-ground management, creating a sophisticated digital infrastructure and web services, supporting new techniques and tools for image analysis, engaging innovative research, and broadcasting to a wider public. Much more is possible. In this report, which surveys longer-term contributions but especially the funding provided by ESRD in 2012-13, we assess accomplishments and deliverables and lean forward to the next phase of work. We include a detailed overview (Appendix 1) of the repeat photography process. There are more than 10,000 historical survey images unexamined and unrepeated in Alberta. Innovative management and decision support tools can be built atop digital tools such as the custom-built ImageLabeler software and MEAT (digital inventory and web services). There is a rich opportunity for public engagement through crowdsourcing repeat images and digital and in situ exhibitions. There is certainly a book in the offing that tells the distinctive story of the mountain surveys and changes over the last century. There are multiple research projects underway that are attracting the next generation of talented graduate students. At the heart of the Mountain Legacy Project Photographs are at the heart of the Mountain Legacy Project. Project members have unearthed over 120,000 archival glass plate negatives originally taken between the 1880s and 1960s by surveyors working for a variety of government departments. There is no other collection of this kind in the world. Photographs cover mountainous regions in Alberta, British Columbia and Yukon, including spectacular interprovincial (AB-BC; BC-Yukon) and international (BC/Yukon-Alaska; 49th parallel). 1 Mountain Legacy Project MLP field crews have re-taken over 5,000 of these images since 1997, and this number grows annually. The MLP photographic collections offer managers, researchers and the public an unprecedented glimpse into landscape conditions during a period of rapid ecological, social, cultural, and economic transition. These are not merely snapshots of a time past. Historical survey images were state-of-the-art and constitute image quality that has only in the last five years been bested by digital cameras. They are systematic and comprehensive, which means that almost every part of the mountainous landscapes--peaks, subalpine, montane, valleys, foothills--are covered. The repeat images are captured with professional-grade medium format digital cameras, producing stunning images that amplify the originals. The vast majority of project assets are digital, and are managed with a purpose-built information system (affectionately known as MEAT: Mountain legacy Editing and Administering Tool). We maintain over 5 terabytes of digital data, which includes versions of both historical and repeat images, meta data, field location images, maps, field notes, survey notes and other materials. In addition to the photographic glass plate negatives, there are also tens of thousands of photographic prints that contain valuable historical and locational information. And, there are hundreds of draft and finished topographic maps, survey notebooks and other documents. In sum, the collections are massive, and we are slowly transforming them to digital form for posterity and widespread availability. What does this make possible? The photographic collections enable many activities: Investigation into landscape change over time (vegetation change, glacial retreat, tree line advancement, fire ecology, etc.) Setting goals for landscape management based on historical patterns of change Understanding cultural perspectives on the mountainous landscapes of Canada Documenting resource extraction impacts on the landscape (mining, forestry, etc.) Interpreting land use history Enhancing archival research Developing and improving techniques for assessing landscape change through photographs, including use of GIS, computer vision, and other computer software to analyze and interpret oblique photographs 2 Mountain Legacy Project MLP is the cumulative work of dozens of field crew members, researchers and research assistants, agency staff, grad students, parks representatives, archivists and librarians, and volunteers. With project partners from Victoria to Edmonton to Ottawa and many places in between. The scope of MLP is magnified by its interdisciplinary nature, as it brings together social and natural sciences, fine arts, library science, computer science, local knowledge, and field skills. Evolution of the Mountain Legacy Project In 1996, Dr. Eric Higgs and Dr. Jeanine Rhemtulla (at the time a graduate student at the University of Alberta) began work repeating M.P. Bridgland’s 1915 photographs of Jasper National Park (the photograph albums were housed by Jasper Nstional Park). Their pilot project examined 80 years of vegetation change in the Athabasca Valley, which was continued successfully through 1998-99, allowing them to re-photograph Bridgland’s entire 1915 survey. In 2000, an award winning website was launched <bridgland.sunsite.ualberta.ca>, to show the power and promise of serving up a large collection of images (it’s difficult now to imagine that fourteen years ago it was cutting edge to serve up large numbers of images on the web!). As research on Bridgland’s work continued, U of A researchers uncovered in 2000 a vast collection of glass plate negatives housed at an archival facility outside Ottawa. In 2002, they began repeating Bridgland’s 1913-14 Crowsnest Forest Reserve Survey using scans from glass plate negatives at Library and Archives Canada. After the success of the Jasper “Bridgland Project” the researchers expanded their work to Waterton Lakes National Park in 2003. Reflecting this expansion, they renamed the Bridgland Project to the Rocky Mountain Repeat Photography Project. This first field season in Waterton is remembered for its auspicious beginning, having very nearly been nearly smoked out by many large forest fires. However, the team pressed on and expanded work into the Crowsnest Forest Reserve, the Castle-Crown Wilderness and Kootenay National Park in BC. In 2007, the Rocky Mountain Repeat Photography Project was again renamed, this time to the Mountain Legacy Project, to reflect the growing scope of the collections. Repeat photography using photo-topographical collections has since progressed far beyond the scope of researchers anticipated when the Jasper “Bridgland Project” began over a decade before. In the field The original surveyors were a remarkable group. J.J. McArthur, the first Dominion Land Surveyor to use the photographic mapping techniques, climbed dozens of mountains in Banff and environs from 1888-92, and later worked the Yukon-Alaska Boundary survey. A.O. Wheeler not only conducted surveys from 1895-1924, but was the first President of the Alpine Club of Canada. His son, E.O. Wheeler, participated in the first survey of Mt. Everest, and later became the Surveyor General of 3 Mountain Legacy Project India. M.P. Bridgland, who wrote the definitive book on phototopographic surveying, was the first Chief Mountaineer of the Alpine Club of Canada, and remained engaged in fieldwork from 1902-30. We wrote a book about his exploits and achievements.1 The field conditions were daunting for the early surveyors. Otto Klotz, for example, wrote about conditions in the Yukon-Alaska boundary survey in 1894: “Many a time did an early morning bode a fair day, when a start would be made from a seashore where camp was almost invariably pitched, for an ascent of perhaps five thousand feet, only to find after hours of scrambling through Devil’s Club (Fatsia horrida), knee-deep moss, windfalls, alder brush on land slides; then emerging through timber line onto rock and snow and glaciers with their treacherous crevasses; skirting chasms and abysses, at times with only slender foot-hold to save from the yawning depths; again lying full length with arms extended on smooth, slippery glaciated rock and creeping along, onward--upwards to the goals, and when reach, oneself enveloped in a bank of clouds hovering around the peak and completely shutting out the world.”2 We face many similar challenges, although much secured now by safety-back up systems, contemporary gear, maps (!), and helicopters. Nonetheless, the field crews who walk in the same footsteps as their historical counterparts are remarkable in their own right. Jeanine Rhemtulla, the first photographer and researcher on the project, is now a professor in Environmental Studies and Geography at McGill University. Trudi Smith, a professional photographer and graduate student at the time, spent four seasons in Waterton and north, completed her PhD and is now Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Victoria. Chris Gat (MSc Computer Science) went into the field for a season and developed much of MLP’s digital infrastructure. Mandy Annand, who completed her BSc Honours at UVic, led the field crew through two demanding seasons. Stuart Higgs (no relation to Eric Higgs), completed