Mt. Robson and Mt. Assiniboine Provincial Parks: examining 100 years of landscape change

Mt. Assiniboine Provincial Park and images from the Inter-Provincial Boundary Survey

Background
From 1913 to 1927 survey crews undertook a huge project – mapping the boundary between British Columbia and Alberta. The project, named the Inter-Provincial Boundary Survey (IPBS), required resource commitments from the Federal government and the provinces of BC and Alberta. Alberta’s representative to the project was Richard William Cautley. He had the responsibility of surveying and marking the major passes along the border. BC’s representative was Arthur Oliver Wheeler, who was responsible for photo-topographical map making. This is a process that blends classic survey methodology with panoramic photography, allowing maps to show topographic features. It is the photo-topographical images that the Mountain Legacy Project seeks to repeat.

Wheeler and his team visited the Mt. Assiniboine area twice – once for several weeks in the fall of 1913 and again in the fall of 1916.

Jay Sherwood gives an excellent overview of the IPBS in this part of BC and Alberta in his book Surveying the Great Divide: The Alberta/BC Boundary Survey, 1913-1916.

Stations and images
The map below gives locations for all Wheeler IPBS stations on the ground in present-day Assiniboine Provincial Park. Click on it to open an interactive version.

Statistics for images in the Mt. Assiniboine area are as follows:

• 12 Station occupied in 1913 / 46 images taken / 46 repeated in 2010 and 2017.
• 6 Stations occupied in 1916 / 57 images taken / 18 repeated in 2017

As of 2019 all historic images have high-resolution copies available to MLP researchers and colleagues. Copies of all historic images and completed repeats are available online at explore.mountainlegacy.ca

Stations in Mt. Assiniboine Provincial Park

Surveyed by A. O. Wheeler and company in 1913 and 1916 as part of the Inter-Provincial Boundary Survey with repeats by MLP in 2010 and 2017. Click to open an interactive Google Map with links to each station.

View more historic/modern image panoramas taken in 2017 by MLP in Mt. Assiniboine Provincial Park: Re-photography in Assiniboine.

Mt. Robson Provincial Park and images from the 1911 Alpine Club of Canada / Smithsonian Institution Expedition

Background
In the summer of 1911 Arthur Wheeler led an ambitious expedition into Jasper Park, the Yellowhead Pass, and around Mt. Robson. As well as enjoying the support of the BC, Alberta, and Federal governments, the expedition was also backed by the Alpine Club of Canada and the Smithsonian Institution. The Grand Trunk Pacific Railway also contributed – as A. O. Wheeler says “handsomely to expenses”.

Key expedition goals were the collection of flora, fauna, and geology, and undertaking photo-topographical mapping.The team consisted of A. O. Wheeler, leader; Konrad Kain, guide; Byron Harmon, official photographer (but not the photo-topographical photographer – that role fell to Wheeler); Casey Jones, cook; Donald “Curly” Phillips, outfitter; George Kinney, assistant; Ned Hollister and J. H. Riley, United States National Museum, bird and flora collections; Charles Walcott Jr. and H. H. Blagden, hunters and big game collectors. They left Edmonton on July 1 and the last team members came out at Laggan (Lake Louise) on Sept 30, 1911.

In all 237 images were taken by Wheeler and company in the Mt. Robson area. They are, in many cases, the first photographs made in the area and reveal a stunningly diverse landscape from the valley of the Fraser River to close-up views of Mt. Robson – at 3,954 m the highest peak in the Canadian Rockies.

The story behind the images is a compelling one: A first person account from Arthur Wheeler, trail notes from George Kinney, and an account of getting everyone home again by Donald Phillips all appear in the 1912 edition of the Canadian Alpine Journal. 110 years of CAJ content is online and searchable –  read the story of the 1911 Expedition in its pages.

Stations and images
The map below gives locations for all 1911 Expedition stations on the ground in present-day Mt. Robson Provincial Park. Click on it to open an interactive version.

Statistics for images in the Mt. Robson area are as follows:

• 35 Station occupied in 1911
• 237 images taken
• 4 stations repeated (3 in 2012, 1 in 2011)
• 22 repeat images taken

As of 2019 all 237 historic images have high-resolution copies available to MLP researchers and colleagues. Copies of all historic images and completed repeats are available online at explore.mountainlegacy.ca

Stations in Mt. Robson Provincial Park

Historic images from 1911 led by A. O. Wheeler. Repeats by MLP in 2011 and 2012. Click to open an interactive Google Map with links to each station.

View Mt. Robson Provincial Park image classification work undertaken by MLP in 2017/18 as part of a Living Lab grant at https://robsonlandscape.weebly.com/

Land cover analysis sample from Mt. Assiniboine Provincial Park

Image analysis background
For 20 years the Mountain Legacy Project (MLP) has been locating and repeating historic mountain photographs from the Canadian mountain west. These historic/modern image pairs can be analyzed and used in many ways – for example:

• show direct effects of climate change – especially in areas where direct human impact is negligible;
• identify areas of larger/smaller change;
• categorize and classify historic/modern landscapes;
• partner and augment other remotely sensed data;
• show historic and cultural evidence of Indigenous peoples on the land;
• allow the public to better understand extent of change.

MLP researchers have been working hard on software to help understand the image pairs and are pleased to offer the Image Analysis Toolkit as a resource for this purpose. The tool is still in development, but a sample of the type of analysis it can assist with is  presented below.

Mt. Assiniboine from below Nub Peak – a land cover change example

Nub Station #1: 2017	Nub Station #1: 1913
Vegetation & Land Cover Classification Mask: 2017	Vegetation & Land Cover Classification Mask: 1913
Vegetation and Land Cover Classes

The classification categories selected were arrived at in consultation with BC Parks ecologists. They were applied to images using the MLP’s web-based Image Analysis Toolkit. Certainly the loss of glacial ice in the intervening 104 years is noticeable. More startling, perhaps, is the homogenization of the land cover. The landscape captured in the 1913 images appears to be much more diverse in makeup than the same view in 2017. Dense coniferous forest seems to be infilling much of the mid-ground area in the photographs.

Using the land cover classification masks, IAT can quantify both the within and between image values for each class yielding a change matrix.

Change matrix showing the percentage of cover change between the 1913 and 2017 images taken from Nub Station #1.

As described in the change matrix, the Dense Coniferous class has increased 29%. IAT can also show where this change has occurred. The image below is a union of all areas classed as Dense Coniferous across the two images.

All Dense Coniferous areas across both images.

11% of the category remains unchanged between the two images – indeed, all of the 1913 DC class is encompassed in the 2017 class. 29.3% of the total Dense Coniferous category occurs in the 2017 image. A very small portion close to present day Magog Lake campground – less than 1% – occurs in 1913 and not in 2017. A recent publication by Fortin et. al. [1] suggests that over the past century this type of conifer densification appears to be occurring throughout Rocky Mountain landscapes.

Perhaps of more interest, especially to resource managers, is the ability to look backwards from 2017 to 1913 and answer the question “if it is dense coniferous forest in 2017, what was it in 1913”? IAT can provide a visualization to answer this question.

Dense Coniferous Forest category change from 2017 to 1913.

Going forward: Questions, comments, possibilities
Use of this type of image classification technique often raises a number of questions. Some of the key ones are as follows:

• Are the percentages in the images representative of similar percentages on the ground? Since these images are oblique “human-eye” views and not orthogonal “look-straight-down photos”, components in the landscape might be hidden by topography. However, if images look out over the landscape from a high vantage point (as the Nub Station No 1 images do)  Fortin et. al. [1], and Rhemtulla et. al. [2], suggest that the percentages are very similar.
• Is it possible to geo-rectify the classifications, putting them on a 2D map or 3D DEM, and/or making them available as digital assets suitable for GIS work? MLP researchers have been devoting time to this issue for the past year. Challenges around geo-rectification are substantial, but the MLP team is cautiously optimistic that software designed to address the problem will be available in fall of 2019.
• This is only one photo pair – do the other photos taken in the Assiniboine area show the same type of conifer densification? What other changes/similarities are present? Nub Station No 1 is the only image pair MLP has analyzed in Mt. Assinboine Provincial Park. However, all 46 of the 1913 images have been repeated and at first glance conifer infill as well as up-slope movement of the Alpine Treeline Ecotone (ATE) is evident.Examine any of the Assniboine historic/modern image comparison online at explore.mountainlegacy.ca to see further evidence of forest infill. Panoramic images of historic and repeat images from stations within the park are available here: 2017 Re-photography in Mt. Assiniboine Provincial Park.
• What are some of the take-aways from this work that resource managers might find useful? As there are still many images to repeat and analyze in Assiniboine, perhaps the biggest take-aways are the questions raised with even just this one historic/modern image pair analysis. The ability to have a vegetation classification map for a landscape as it existed 100 years ago offers interesting possibilities – especially in a warming world where wildfire mitigation strategies are becoming more and more important. Historic images, their modern repeats, and land cover change data can help address some pressing questions. For example – How prevalent was fire on historic mountain ecosystems? How, if at all, did it help shape the landscape? What role, if any, did anthropogenic burning play? Do we see evidence of such burning on the landscape? Could restoring the “patchy” landscape diversity visible in the historic images play a mitigating role in light of increasingly severe wildfire regimes in the Canadian mountain west? 

With so many interesting questions to pursue, Mountain Legacy researchers are keen to work further with BC Parks and the Living Lab Project.

[1] J. A.  Fortin, J. T. Fisher, J. M. Rhemtulla, and E. S. Higgs, “Estimates of landscape composition from terrestrial oblique photographs suggest homogenization of Rocky Mountain landscapes over the last century,” Remote Sensing in Ecology and Conservation, 2:100, Dec, 2018.  Available: http://cie.ed.asu.edu/volume6/number12/. [Accessed May 31, 2019].

[2] J. M. Rhemtulla, R.J. Hall, E.S. Higgs, and S.E. Macdonald, “Eighty years of change; vegetation in the montane ecoregion of Jasper National Park, Alberta, Canada.” Can. Journal of Forestry Resources, 32: 2010–2021, 2002. Available: https://www.nrcresearchpress.com/doi/abs/10.1139/x02-112#.XQLp1Y97laR. [Accessed May 31, 2019].