ACIMS Sensitive Element Occurrence (ATS Township)

An Element Occurrence (EO) is an area of land and/or water in which a species or ecological community is, or was, present. An Element is either a species (or subspecies taxa) or an ecological community, the Occurrence is the documented location. The EO concept is part of NatureServe methodology. This methodology is used throughout the NatureServe network. EOs are created based on the Element Occurrence Data Standard and are a derived product developed from submitted observations. An EO should have practical conservation value for the Element as evidenced by potential continued (or historical) presence and/or regular recurrence at a given location. For Species Elements, the EO often corresponds with the local population, but when appropriate may be a portion of a population (e.g., for long distance dispersers) or may be a group of nearby populations (e.g., metapopulation). For Ecological Community Elements, the EO may represent a stand or patch of a natural community, or a cluster of stands or patches of a natural community. This dataset contains Sensitive EOs. Sensitive EOs are occurrences of species that are rare (or of conservation concern) and in these cases the precise location details cannot be distributed without due cause. In most cases these locations are not freely available because the species are legally listed (for example, under Schedule 1 of the Species at Risk Act) or are of particular concern to the Alberta government, thus Sensitive EO data in this layer is hazed (generalized) to the Alberta Township System Township (ATS) polygons (v4.1). This data updates on a daily basis.