Trans-Canada Highway Research Articles

Funds Management and Performance of Infrastructural Projects in Canada: A Case Study of Trans-Canada Highway

Funds management is a crucial aspect of infrastructure projects, ensuring that financial resources are effectively allocated and utilized to achieve project goals. It involves the strategic planning, budgeting, and monitoring of funds throughout the project lifecycle. The performance of infrastructural projects is measured through various indicators, including cost management, schedule adherence, quality of deliverables, and overall project outcomes. Effective funds management plays a significant role in project performance, as it helps ensure that funds are allocated optimally and used efficiently. Infrastructure projects often require substantial investments, and funds management helps mitigate financial risks by monitoring expenditures, identifying cost overruns or budget deviations, and implementing corrective measures. It also involves financial forecasting and risk assessment to anticipate and address potential challenges or constraints that may impact project performance. The study used the descriptive research design. The target population was 35 members of Transport Canada. The study did sampling of 25 respondents that were selected from the target population of 35 members of Transport Canada. The collection of data was conducted through stratified random sampling whereby questionnaires were used to gather data. The study concluded that the challenges surrounding funds management, cost control, performance evaluation, environmental considerations, and stakeholder collaboration must be addressed to ensure the optimal utilization of resources and the long-term sustainability of the project. Securing stable and adequate funding sources from national and provincial governments is crucial for the Trans-Canada Highway's continued development and maintenance. The study recommended that both national and provincial governments should establish a long-term funding plan that spans the entire lifecycle of the project. Regular assessments and data collection should be conducted to identify bottlenecks, areas for improvement, and emerging needs. Keywords: Funds Management, Performance, Infrastructural Projects, Canada

Reactions

CONSUMER PRODUCTS Reactions ShareShare onFacebookTwitterWechatLinked InRedditEmail C&EN, 2022, 100 (43), p 5December 5, 2022Cite this:C&EN 100, 43, 5Letters to the editorMoose adventures in CanadaThe photo of the crash test dummy moose in Newscripts (C&EN, Sept. 19, 2022, page 32) brought back the memory of motoring with my wife on the Trans-Canada Highway north of Lake Superior in about 1980. As we registered in a motel in Wawa, Ontario, the desk clerk asked me if I had noticed a little red sports car in the lot. It and its driver had survived driving under a moose.Incidentally, when I had a summer job in the research lab of Canadian Industries Limited at McMasterville, Quebec, in 1947, the lab had a system of prizes: the One Bell Prize for a helpful bit of lab technique, the Two Bell Prize for finding a new substance of interest, the Three Bell Prize for a major advance, and the No Bell Prize for a conspicuous goof.Robert A. StairsPeterborough, OntarioRegulation of benzene in liquefied petroleum gasThe propane, butane, and isobutane mentioned in the article on benzene in dry shampoo (C&EN, Oct. 24/31, 2022, page 10) are sold as liquefied petroleum gas, known to the consumer as propane. Liquefied petroleum gas is a commodity produced by oil refineries and sold as a fuel for cooking, heating, grain drying, forklift trucks, and even backyard barbecues.The benzene discovery indicates contamination of some of it. As a commodity, it is easily commingled in distribution, as some may be supplied from multiple sources. Benzene in liquefied petroleum gas used as fuel may not be a concern, but caution is required when liquefied petroleum gas is used as a propellant in aerosol consumer products. In addition to cosmetic products, bug sprays and spray paints might be affected.The benzene content of gasoline is regulated. Is benzene regulated in liquefied petroleum gas?Paul E. EcklerWildwood, Missouri ACS 2021 IRS Form 990 availableThe American Chemical Society’s 2021 IRS Form 990 is now available on the ACS website. To access the information, go to www.acs.org/acsirsform990. Please scroll toward the bottom of the page to access the 2021 form and related Guide to Schedule J for explanatory information regarding ACS executive compensation. If you have any access problems, please contact [email protected]

A before-after-control-impact study of wildlife fencing along a highway in the Canadian Rocky Mountains

Wildlife exclusion fencing has become a standard component of highway mitigation systems designed to reduce collisions with large mammals. Past work on the effectiveness of exclusion fencing has relied heavily on control–impact (i.e., space-for-time substitutions) and before–after study designs. These designs limit inference and may confound the effectiveness of mitigation with co-occurring process that also changes the rate of collisions. We used a replicated (n = 2 sites monitored for over 1000 km years combined) before-after-control-impact study design to assess fencing effectiveness along the Trans-Canada Highway in the Rocky Mountains of Canada. We found that collisions declined for common ungulates species (elk, mule deer, and white-tailed deer) by up to 96% but not for large carnivores. The weak response of carnivores is likely due to the combination of fence intrusions and low sample sizes. We calculated realized fencing effectiveness by applying the same change in collision rates observed at control (unfenced) sites as the expected change for adjacent fenced sections. Compared with the apparent fencing effectiveness (i.e., the difference in WVCs rates before and after fencing was installed), the realized estimates of fencing effectiveness declined by 6% at one site and increased by 10% at another site. When factoring in the cost of ungulate collisions to society, fencing provided a net economic gain within 1 year of construction. Over a 10-year period, fencing would provide a net economic gain of > $500,000 per km in reduced collisions. Our study highlights the benefits of long-term monitoring of road mitigation projects and provides evidence of fencing effectiveness for reducing wildlife–vehicle collisions involving large mammals.

Road mitigation structures reduce the number of reported wildlife‐vehicle collisions in the Bow Valley, Alberta, Canada

AbstractHuman population and economic growth have resulted in roads transecting much of the North American landscape and this has negatively affected wildlife populations by fragmenting habitat, impeding movement between populations and increasing the chance of wildlife‐vehicle collisions. A common conservation tool to counteract these effects is the incorporation of road mitigation structures (RMS, i.e., jumpouts and overpasses/underpasses/fencing) into highway systems. However, gaps remain in our knowledge on RMS efficacy due to a lack of long‐term multispecies studies that can assess temporal and species‐specific variation in use. We investigate the efficacy of the Alberta Environment and Parks and Alberta Transportation RMS on the Trans‐Canada Highway (TCH) in the Bow Valley by analyzing annual reported wildlife‐vehicle collisions over a 23‐year period and wildlife use of the underpasses over a ten‐year period. We found that the incorporation of multiple underpasses and jumpouts, along with fencing, reduced the number of reported wildlife‐vehicle collisions on the TCH. We also found that wildlife use of the RMS exhibited variation with regards to month and location. Overall, our results add to the research supporting RMS effectiveness and suggest that incorporating additional similar infrastructure has the potential to further reduce wildlife‐vehicle collisions on the TCH.

Project ButterBike, or Migrating with Monarchs

Dykman, Sara. 2021. Bicycling with Butterflies: My 10,201-Mile Journey Following the Monarch Migration. Timber Press, Portland, Oregon, USA. The Eastern North American monarch migration, spanning multiple countries and thousands of miles, has long fascinated ecologists, evolutionary biologists, and people of all backgrounds and ages alike. In Bicycling with Butterflies: My 10,201-mile Journey Following the Monarch Migration, Sara Dykman chronicles her expedition across Mexico, the United States, and Canada, cycling along monarch migration routes for nine months. Dykman is a gifted science communicator; she expertly walks readers through phenomena ranging from monarch physiology to coevolution to metapopulation dynamics, using language that is accessible to the general public but still informative to scientists. In this way, it is reminiscent of texts like Anurag Agrawal’s Monarchs and Milkweed (2017) and Sharman Apt Russell’s An Obsession with Butterflies (2004), but it stands out in that each phenomenon is vividly illustrated with Dykman’s personal anecdotes against the backdrop of her epic trip. The book is also an encyclopedia of the people who work with and advocate for monarch butterflies. Dykman details her interactions with guides to the sanctuaries in Mexico, Monarch Watch conservation specialists, “monarch celebrities,” and scientists alike, embodying them with glimpses into their conservation-focused backyards and homes that serve as waypoints throughout her journey. The practical details of her trip are also interesting. The themes of living on the road and cobbling together equipment may seem familiar to field biologists, and the logistics of undertaking such a long bicycle tour alone are fascinating. It is also where a missed opportunity for photographs stands out; as she describes biking along the Mississippi River, the Trans-Canada Highway, and the many other locales, some pictures would have been helpful, especially alongside her vivid descriptions of the ecological and cultural communities associated with each place. The map at the beginning of the book anchors each point of her route to the timing of each chapter effectively, but detailed pictures embedded in the chapters would have added extra clarity. Dykman’s perspective is an interesting one, as a person so captivated by monarch butterflies that she was motivated to bike the entirety of their migration route. In every chapter, her concern for the monarchs and wildlife in general is palpable as she stops to talk to passers-by about the environmental crisis and teach them when best to mow lawns to avoid killing insects, or to pick butterflies and turtles off the road. The gravity with which Dykman approaches these sections can seem a little heavy-handed in the bleakness of her outlook; although she is clearly earnest in trying to communicate the urgency of the situation to her readers, I imagine that most of her audience will already share her sentiments. In places, she also personifies the monarchs, which sometimes seems out of place besides the factually oriented sections on biology. In general, Bicycling with Butterflies is a worthwhile read, with pertinent pieces of information for everyone including cyclists, travelers, and people interested in ecology or the natural world. It serves both as an intriguing ecologist’s travel journal and as a thoughtfully presented compendium of monarch-related information.

Wildlife Crossing Design Influences Effectiveness for Small and Large Mammals in Banff National Park

Banff National Park (BNP) is Canada’s oldest national park and a very popular one, with both year-round residents and millions of annual visitors. In turn, this means there are several busy road and rail transportation routes throughout the park. These factors can have a number of negative effects on local wildlife. The wildlife crossing structures of the Trans-Canada Highway in BNP have become a key conservation tool to conserve biodiversity in the park and beyond. As the first large-scale operation of highway mitigation of its kind in North America, it is a perfect case for understanding the conservation value of highway overpasses and underpasses for a variety of wildlife species including both large and small mammals. It was determined from the research that there is a vast majority of information available for large mammals compared to small mammals. Small mammals used the crossing structures to avoid predators, while large mammals used the crossing structures to avoid humans. The design of the structure was extremely influential on its effectiveness with black bears and cougars preferring narrow bridges with cover, elk preferring wide, open bridges, and smaller mammals, such as weasels, snowshoe hares, and some mice preferring culverts with vegetation cover.

Youth Hostels and Hostile Locals: Vancouver’s ‘Battle of Jericho,’ 1970

Chasing tourist dollars was a necessity for many following the Second World War. However, few people in the summers of 1968 and 1969 could have escaped the sight of hundreds of fashionably penniless baby boomers hitchhiking along roads on their “annual summer trek”. Municipal authorities began to receive complaints about “scruffy young people” panhandling and sleeping rough in cities and towns along the Trans-Canada Highway. Tourism, wanted and unwanted, has the capacity to cause conflict between travelers and locals. In 1970, federally funded youth hostels became the focus of Trudeau’s Liberal government’s need to manage youth unemployment as well as radicalism on university campuses. The focus of this article is youth travel to Vancouver and Vancouverites’ responses to the National Hostel Task Force, which led to sit-ins and police-youth and youth-youth conflict, which culminated in the “Battle of Jericho”. Drawing on contemporary mainstream and university newspaper accounts, Vancouver City Police reports, RCMP intelligence files and activities at University of British Columbia, this article argues that failure to understand the diverse needs of Canada’s young people turned youth tourism into the transient youth problem in the summer of 1970.

Intra-Lake Arcellinida (Testate Lobose Amoebae) Response to Winter De-icing Contamination in an Eastern Canada Road-Side "Salt Belt" Lake.

Salt contamination of lakes, due to the application of winter de-icing salts on roads, presents a significant environmental challenge in the "salt belt" region of eastern North America. The research reported here presents the first deployment of a previously published proxy tool based on Arcellinida (testate lobose amoebae) for monitoring road salt contamination. The research was conducted at Silver Lake in Eastern Ontario, a 4-km-long lake with the heavily traveled Trans-Canada Highway (HWY 7) transiting the entire southern shore. The lake showed elevated conductivity (297-310μS/cm) and sub-brackish conditions (0.14-0.15ppt). Sodium levels were also elevated near the roadside (median Na = 1020ppm). Cluster analysis and nonmetric multidimensional scaling results revealed four distinct Arcellinida assemblages: "Stressed Cool Water Assemblage (SCWA)," "Deep Cold Water Assemblage (DCWA)," both from below the 8-m thermocline, and the shallower water "Shallow Water Assemblage 1 (SWA-1)" and "Shallow Water Assemblage 2 (SWA-2)". Redundancy analysis showed a minor response of Arcellinida to road salt contamination in shallower areas of the lake, with confounding variables significantly impacting assemblage distribution, particularly beneath the thermocline (e.g., water temperature, water depth, sediment runoff from catchment [Ti], sediment geochemistry [Ca, S]). The results of this study indicate that the trophic structure of the lake has to date only been modestly impacted by the cumulative nature of road salt contamination. Nonetheless, the Silver Lake results should be considered of concern and warrant continued arcellinidan biomonitoring to gauge the ongoing and long-term effects of road salt on its ecosystem.

A Nested Ensemble Filtering Approach for Parameter Estimation and Uncertainty Quantification of Traffic Noise Models

In this study, a nested ensemble filtering (NEF) approach is advanced for uncertainty parameter estimation and uncertainty quantification of a traffic noise model. As an extension of the ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) and particle filter methods, the proposed NEF method improves upon the ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) method by incorporating the sample importance resampling (SIR) procedures into the EnKF update process. The NEF method can avoid the overshooting problem (abnormal value (e.g., outside the predefined ranges, complex values) in parameter or state samples) existing in the EnKF update process. The proposed NEF method is applied to the traffic noise prediction on the Trans-Canada Highway in the City of Regina to demonstrate its applicability. The results indicate that: (a) when determining parameters in the traffic noise prediction model, the NEF method provides accurate estimation; (b) the model parameters can be recursively corrected with the NEF method whenever a new measurement becomes available; (c) the uncertainty in the traffic noise model (should be the noise itself) can be well reduced and quantified through the proposed NEF approach.

Demographic fragmentation of a protected wolverine population bisected by a major transportation corridor

Roads fragment ecosystems around the globe, but the effects of this fragmentation on biodiversity remain poorly understood. Wolverines (Gulo gulo) are snow-dependent carnivores that occur at low densities and they exhibit low genetic diversity at the southern extent of their range where they are snow-limited and fragmented by human development. Therefore, understanding the effect of roads and transportation infrastructure on population connectivity in protected strongholds such as national parks is crucial to effective wolverine management in a changing climate. We assessed whether the Trans-Canada Highway, Canada's largest east-west transportation corridor, affects wolverine gene flow in the Rocky Mountains. We used noninvasive genetic sampling methods (i.e., hair traps, backtracking) to collect DNA samples (i.e. hair, scat) from an 8000 km2 area of Banff, Kootenay, and Yoho National Parks and provincial lands and then used population and individual-based genetic analyses (e.g., assignment tests, principal coordinates analysis) to examine genetic structure across the highway in the national parks complex. We collected 2586 DNA samples between 2010 and 2013 from which we identified 49 unique individuals (29 males, 20 females). We detected weak population structure in males and relatively strong genetic differentiation in females spanning the highway with complementary nuclear and mitochondrial DNA analyses. Our results demonstrate that sex-biased dispersal across a major highway can lead to genetic isolation and demographic fragmentation in a protected carnivore population, highlighting the urgent need to maintain connectivity for wildlife over an expanding global road network in the face of climate change, landscape degradation, and loss of biodiversity.

Factors affecting the permeability of road mitigation measures to the movement of small mammals

Mitigation measures, such as wildlife-exclusion fencing and crossing structures (overpasses, underpasses, culverts), have been widely demonstrated to reduce the negative effects of roads on medium-sized and large animals. It is unclear how these mitigation measures influence the movement of small mammals (<5 kg). Our study has three objectives: (1) to test whether culverts improve highway permeability; (2) to determine factors associated with culvert use, such as culvert obstruction by snow; (3) to evaluate factors contributing towards fence permeability, such as the presence of a culvert, snow depth, and fence mesh size. We used snow tracking to assess the movement for four small-mammal taxa along the Trans-Canada Highway corridor in Banff National Park, Alberta, Canada. We found that the presence of a culvert within 100 m of transects significantly improved fence and highway permeability. Obstruction of the culvert entrance by snow was negatively correlated with the probability of use, and therefore, of highway permeability. Furthermore, the mesh size of the fencing did not affect fence or highway permeability. We recommend that culvert entrances be located on the outside of fenced right-of-ways to reduce obstruction by highway maintenance activities such as snowplowing.

Wildlife mortality on roads and railways following highway mitigation

AbstractWildlife mortality caused by collisions with vehicles on roads is increasingly and effectively mitigated with exclusion fencing and crossing structures, but this solution potentially changes wildlife habitat use and distribution to increase the risk of mortality on adjacent, unmitigated railways. We investigated this potential side‐effect of mitigating the TransCanada Highway, which was completed in sections between 1983 and 2013, on the rate of wildlife mortality on the nearby transcontinental mainline of the Canadian Pacific Railway in Banff National Park. For each transportation class (highway and railway), we calculated collision rate as the number of collisions per year and km for two guilds (carnivores and ungulates) before and after mitigation occurred between 1981 and 2014. We constructed additional models for each transportation class and each of four species groups with adequate sample sizes: elk (Cervus canadensis), other ungulates (family Cervidae), bears (Ursus spp.), and coyotes (Canis latrans). Across guilds, mortality rates declined after mitigation, particularly on the highway (as expected) and most strongly for ungulates. For individual species groups, mortality on the railway for elk was best predicted by year and population size, without the inclusion of mitigation status on the adjacent highway. However, collision rates on the railway increased after mitigation for other ungulates (mostly deer, Odocoileus spp.) while also increasing over time. Collision rates on the railway increased over time for bears, but not in relation to highway mitigation. We found no evidence that the spatial distribution of collisions on the railway changed after highway mitigation, as might be expected from a funneling effect of crossing structures. Our results support and extend previous work demonstrating that exclusion fencing and wildlife crossing structures reduce wildlife mortalities on the highway at this location, and provide limited evidence, for other ungulates alone, that such mitigation may increase mortality on the adjacent railway. Similar analyses are warranted in other locations, particularly mountainous regions, where major transportation features often occur in close proximity.

Explorer on the Trans-Canada: Cold War Tourism and the Early Years of the Canadian Highway

This article asks what happens when an image of the Canadian nation marketed to American tourists also simultaneously helps produce a vision of highway nationalism in Canada. Starting with a primary discursive analysis of Trans-Canada Highway tourist brochures, I then address three Canadian travelogues from the period—Edward McCourt’s The Road across Canada (1965), Walter Stewart’s series for Star Weekly magazine (1965), and John M. Mitchell’s Coast to Coast across Canada (1967). While the travelogues implicitly replicate the same visions of the colonial adventurer family attached to the brochures—which I contextualize according to Western Cold War middle-class presentations of freedom and consumption—simultaneously McCourt’s and Stewart’s texts foreground discomfort with the tourist industry’s Americanization of nation-space along the highway. By celebrating Western nuclear family values through the image of colonial exploration, while also questioning the integrity of an Americanizing tourist industry, McCourt’s and Stewart’s travelogues—published just a few years after the Trans-Canada Highway officially opened in 1962—realize the way early representations of the highway were marked by a co-opted nationalism where the means of nationalist differentiation simultaneously encouraged a feedback loop of American imperialism.

A Multi-Faceted Debris-Flood Hazard Assessment for Cougar Creek, Alberta, Canada

A destructive debris flood occurred between 19 and 21 June 2013 on Cougar Creek, located in Canmore, Alberta. Cougar Creek fan is likely the most densely developed alluvial fan in Canada. While no lives were lost, the event resulted in approximately $40 M of damage and closed both the Trans-Canada Highway (Highway 1) and the Canadian Pacific Railway line for a period of several days. The debris flood triggered a comprehensive hazard assessment which is the focus of this paper. Debris-flood frequencies and magnitudes are determined by combining several quantitative methods including photogrammetry, dendrochronology, radiometric dating, test pit logging, empirical relationships between rainfall volumes and sediment volumes, and landslide dam outburst flood modeling. The data analysis suggests that three distinct process types act in the watershed. The most frequent process is normal or “clearwater” floods. Less frequent but more damaging are debris floods during which excessive amounts of bedload are transported on the fan, typically associated with rapid and extensive bank erosion and channel infilling and widening. The third and most destructive process is interpreted to be landslide dam outbreak floods. This event type is estimated to occur at return periods exceeding 300 years. Using a cumulative magnitude frequency technique, the data for conventional debris floods were plotted up to the 100–300s year return period. A peak-over-threshold approach was used for landslide dam outbreak floods occurring at return periods exceeding 300 years, as not all such events were identified during test trenching. Hydrographs for 6 return period classes were approximated by using the estimated peak discharges and fitting the hydrograph shape to integrate to the debris flood volumes as determined from the frequency-magnitude relationship. The fan volume was calculated and compared with the integrated frequency-magnitude curve to check of the validity of the latter. A reasonable match was accomplished, verifying the overall relationship. The findings from this work were later used as input to a risk assessment seeking to quantify risk to loss of life and economic losses. The risk assessment then formed the basis for design of debris-flood mitigation structures.

Road Pricing in Theory and Practice: A Canadian Perspective

Like other developed countries, Canada experienced massive increases in road transportation since the end of the Second World War. At first, Canadian governments attempted to match the growing demand for road transportation by improving the quality and capacity of roads and highways - significantly increasing the extent of paved roadways and introducing a national highway system supported by federal shared-cost funding. Since the 1970s, however, Canadian governments have been less willing to invest in roads and highways, as growing environmental concerns lessened public enthusiasm for automobiles and urban expressways in particular. At the same time, government support for public transit decreased, resulting in recurring fare increases and reduced ridership per capita. As a result, road congestion has increased significantly in Canada, particularly in the largest urban areas, the Greater Golden Horseshoe area surrounding Toronto, and along the Trans-Canada highway from Quebec City to Windsor, Ontario. In order to finance improvements to road and transit infrastructure and address the growing problem of road congestion in Canada, the federal government has promised to share a portion of the federal gas tax with municipalities, and provincial governments have established urban transportation authorities, increased funding for public transit, and plan to introduce high occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes as an incentive for people to carpool. Notably absent from these measures, however, are any concrete proposals to introduce more explicit road prices in the form of tolls and congestion-related charges. This paper hopes to contribute to Canadian public policy by making a case for increased reliance on explicit charges for the use of Canada's roads and highways. Part II considers road pricing in theory, considering the main arguments for and against road user charges as well as their optimal design. Part III reviews international experience with road pricing in order to derive lessons for the Canadian context. Part IV offers tentative conclusions.

Modelling Dependence between Traffic Noise and Traffic Flow through An Entropy-Copula Method

In this study, an entropy-copula method is proposed for modelling dependence between traffic volume and traffic noise on the Trans-Canada Highway (#1 highway of Canada) in the City of Regina based on a series of field experiment measurements. The proposed entropy-copula method combines the maximum entropy and copula methods into a general framework. The marginal distributions of traffic volume and traffic noise are estimated through the principle of maximum entropy (POME) theory, and the joint probabilities are derived through the Gaussian and Student t copulas. The underlying assumptions of the coupled entropy-copula method are that: i) the entropy variables are mutually independent from each other, and ii) the marginal distributions of traffic flow and traffic noise are continuous. The proposed method is applied to two field experiment sites on the Trans-Canada Highway. Based on the K-S and A-D tests and RMSE value, the entropy method shows well performance in quantifying the probability distributions of traffic volume and traffic noise. Meanwhile, both the Gaussian and Student t copulas can well model the joint probability distributions of the traffic volume and traffic noise at the both experiment sites, which is demonstrated by the CramA©r von Mises statistics and the RMSE value. Furthermore, the conditional CDFs of the traffic noise at the two experiment sites are derived based on the established copulas with respect to different traffic volume scenarios. These conditional CDFs indicate positive structures between traffic volume and traffic noise at the both experiment sites. The conditional PDFs of the traffic noise under different traffic flow scenarios are also generated, indicating the potential reduction effect of traffic noise due to the decrease of the traffic volume. This proposed approach can quantify the dependence between traffic flow and traffic noise, and reveal the inherent uncertain relationship between these two variables. Moreover, the obtained results can provide useful information for traffic noise reduction through traffic flow management.

The 2013 flood event in the South Saskatchewan and Elk River basins: Causes, assessment and damages

In late June 2013, heavy rainfall and rapidly melting alpine snow triggered flooding throughout much of the southern half of Alberta. Heavy rainfall commenced on 19 June and continued for 3 days. When the event was over, more than 200 mm and as much as 350 mm of precipitation had fallen over the Front Ranges of the Canadian Rocky Mountains. Tributaries to the Bow River including the Ghost, Kananaskis, Elbow, Sheep and Highwood, and many of their tributaries, all reached flood levels. The storm had a large spatial extent causing flooding to the north and south in the Red Deer and Oldman Basins, and also to the west in the Elk River in British Columbia. Convergence of the nearly synchronous floodwaters downstream in the South Saskatchewan River system caused record high releases from Lake Diefenbaker through Gardiner Dam. Dam releases in Alberta and Saskatchewan attenuated the downstream flood peak such that only moderate flooding occurred in Saskatchewan and Manitoba. More than a dozen municipalities declared local states of emergency; numerous communities were placed under evacuation order in Alberta and Saskatchewan. The media reported that more than 100,000 people needed to evacuate their homes, and five people died. At CAD$6 billion, the Province of Alberta estimated that it was the costliest natural disaster in Canadian history. At their peak, the water levels were the highest in the past 60 years, and nearing those of historic events of the late 1800s and early 1900s where records exist. There was major damage to infrastructure roads, bridges and culverts. Downtown Calgary was inundated, as were many communities such as High River and Bragg Creek. Debris flows and debris torrents affected communities such as Canmore and Exshaw, and isolated many mountain communities including closing the TransCanada Highway for several days. Environment Canada called it the “Flood of Floods.” Insured losses of CAD$2 billion included thousands of cars and homes demolished and damaged by backed-up sewers. Flood damage losses and recovery costs from the flood are projected to exceed CAD$6 billion.

Analysis of long-term weather, snow and avalanche data at Glacier National Park, B.C., Canada

Long-term changes of the global climate system have been observed. However, the effect of long-term changes in the climate system on avalanche hazard in mountainous areas remains inconclusive. For this study we analyzed long-term weather, snow cover, and avalanche data from Glacier National Park. Weather and snow cover data were measured at two sites (1315m and 1905ma.s.l.). The avalanche data were observed along the section of the Trans Canada Highway within the park. Meteorological data were analyzed by winter season, i.e. early, mid and late winter, represented by three-month periods between September and May. Increasing trends were found for the mean seasonal air temperature at both stations during the mid season. Trends for the solid precipitation rate were not significant, indicating no trend towards more rain events. Decreasing trends of the maximum snow depth were only found for the lower elevation station at Rogers Pass for the mid and late season, which is consistent with decreasing trends for all seasons of the mean 24-hour new snow amounts at the lower elevation and for the mid season at the higher elevation station at Mt. Fidelity. Due to uncertainty arising from changes in explosive control, we draw no conclusions regarding the regional change of avalanche activity. However, the weather and snowpack trends observed in Glacier National Park are consistent with longer time series from mountains with similar latitudes and elevations in France and Switzerland.

Sheila Ayearst, the Trans-Canada Highway and the Landscape of Ruin

Sheila Ayearst, the Trans-Canada Highway and the Landscape of Ruin

Lack of detectable genetic differentiation between den populations of the Prairie Rattlesnake (Crotalusviridis) in a fragmented landscape

Numerous studies have reported genetic fragmentation of species whose habitat has been modified by roads and other anthropogenic features, but it is still not clear how most species respond to roads and whether genetic effects can be detected over a limited number of generations. We used road-crossing models and population genetic analysis (based on microsatellite loci) to make inferences about functional connectivity between populations of the Prairie Rattlesnake (Crotalus viridis (Rafinesque, 1818)) on opposite sides of the Trans-Canada Highway near Medicine Hat (Alberta, Canada). The road-crossing model predicted a high probability of mortality while crossing the Trans-Canada Highway. However, model-based genetic clustering methods (STRUCTURE and BAPS) did not detect structure; a nonmodel-based clustering method (DAPC) found structure, but most groups consisted of individuals captured throughout the study area. Estimates of effective population size were immeasurably large and power to detect genic differentiation was diminished if the effective size exceeded 500; this reduction in power was intensified when the number of loci was reduced (from eight to five to account for null alleles). Our results corroborate accounts of long-distance migration by this species and indicate that genetic fragmentation may not be easily detectable over this spatial and temporal scale.