MOUNTAIN LEGACY PROJECT

Capturing change in Canada's mountains

About Mountain Legacy Project

The Mountain Legacy Project explores changes in Canada’s mountain landscapes through the world’s largest collection of systematic high-resolution historic mountain photographs (>120,000) and a vast and growing collection of repeat images (>8,000 photo pairs). Find out about our research and how we turn remarkable photos into real-world solutions for understanding climate change, ecological processes, and strategies for ecological restoration. Read more

Eric Higgs, PhD

Director
Office phone:
250-721-8228

E-mail:
ehiggs at uvic dot ca

Environmental Studies, University of Victoria

Putting the Clues Together: Figuring out Camera Locations

  The repeat photography undertaken at the Mountain Legacy Project (MLP) requires thorough preparation before the season starts, and long days in the field hiking to remote peaks and promontories, as Claire and Daniel recount in their climb up Mt Alderson ("A Day...

“Mountain Legacies”: The Podcast

Mt Robson and the Robson Glacier, A.O. Wheeler, 1911 Here at MLP, we’re always excited to talk about mountains. We were recently lucky enough to work with Mendel Skulski and Adam Huggins at Futures Ecologies, who turned our learnings in and about mountains into a new...

A Day in the Field: Going up Mt Alderson

The Mountain Legacy Project (MLP) now boasts over 10,000 repeat photographs collected over close to three decades. Our repeat photography involves intense fieldwork across Canada’s mountain landscapes. In the following series of blog posts, we turn our focus "behind...

PART 2: Spatial analysis of repeated oblique images to study change in mountain landscapes

By Claire Wright | April 11, 2022 In the previous blog, Origins of Repeat Photography as Tool for Monitoring Landscape Change, I argued that repeat photography is an effective and flexible technique for examining change in mountain landscapes. With historic...

PART 1: Origins of repeat photography as a tool for monitoring change in mountain landscapes

  By Claire Wright | April 2, 2022 Mountain landscapes are often perceived of as part of the last ‘untouched’ wilderness in the world. In reality, they have long been homelands for Indigenous peoples and are subject to intense and widespread change as a result of...

MLP Explorer: A brand new (digital) face

The Mountain Legacy Project launched a brand new Explorer tool. Building on our previous public-facing website it is a future-oriented platform for serving up images and information about the world’s largest systematic collection of mountain repeat photography.

Re-Reading the Archival Photographs: Mining Scientific Photography to Build Many Meanings

Jill Delaney, Lead Archivist, Photography, Private Archives, and MLP Archivist at Library and Archives Canada takes us behind the scenes of the 60,000+ historic images held at LAC and used for the Mountain Legacy Project’s repeat photography studies.

Digital Permanence in the era of Open Science

Will our digital information persist over time? in 10 years…100 years… 1,000 years…? Join UVic Data Curation Librarian Shahira Khair for a look at some answers.

Deep learning offers new prospects for exploration of Canada’s changing mountain ecosystems

by Spencer Rose | Mar 4, 2021  The Mountain Legacy Project (MLP) collection is a vast visual record of ecosystem changes in Canada’s mountains. With more than 120,000 high-resolution historical photos spanning the 1860s through the 1950s, along...

Fieldwork in a Time of COVID-19 Part 3: Jasper National Park

by James Tricker, February 15, 2021 After a wonderful week in Kananaskis Country, the field crew arrived in Jasper National Park (JNP) for the final leg of the shortened field season. JNP is where it all began for the Mountain Legacy Project. Back in the summer of...

The Collection

A vast collection of historical mountain photographs created between 1861 and 1958 by surveyors establishing national and provincial boundaries, creating topographic maps, and exploring geological resources

Starting with a series of historical digital images, we puzzle out the exact location of the original surveyors. This is the first step in a chain of complex arrangements that places a repeat photography crew on a mountain summit or ridge… read more

MLP Works

Since its beginning in 1996 MLP Works has provided access to the publications, articles, media, and other scientific and creative products generated through use of MLP techniques and images.
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Explore

Explore is a map-based search tool designed to allow anyone with a modern web browser to view, compare, and download MLP’s vast collection of historic and repeat images.
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Analysis

Every image pair can be explored in depth with the Image Analysis Toolkit. IAT supports side-by-side image visualization, including categorization, annotation, scaling, cross and wipe fades, classification statistics, and more.
View the Image Analysis ToolKit

Projects & Galleries

The vast size of our collections means that diamonds—remarkable images that cue into contemporary concerns or historical fascination– are often buried. We present curated galleries that emerge from the work of our teams, whether driven by research questions or personal fascination. Check back regularly for new presentations.

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“In much of the Canadian west these are the first images of these landscapes and a vital baseline for studies of change over the last century. They are invaluable to conservation projects that seek to understand and/or restore pre-settlement landscapes and their dynamic ecosystems.”

Brian Luckman

Professor Emeritus, Department of Geography

University of Western Ontario

“In much of the Canadian west these are the first images of these landscapes and a vital baseline for studies of change over the last century. They are invaluable to conservation projects that seek to understand and/or restore pre-settlement landscapes and their dynamic ecosystems.”

Brian Luckman

Professor Emeritus, Department of Geography

University of Western Ontario