Oil-sands Watershed Disturbance Monitoring

The Joint Oil Sands Monitoring Plan (JOSMP) is a comprehensive, integrated, and transparent environmental monitoring program for the Athabasca Oil Sands region in northern Alberta, Canada, an area of more than 30,000 km².

Monitoring includes the impact of land cover change through Oil Sands development on the hydrologic function of tributaries to the Athabasca River, the major river flowing through the region. Earth observation (EO) data are used to determine the extent of watershed disturbance as an input to water balance modelling to estimate the annual change in hydrological function from baseline (pre-development) conditions. EO-based monitoring began in 2005 using Landsat TM data. This approach was improved through the use of SPOT-5 and, more recently, RapidEye images. Methods of land change detection also improved, to include the use of image-image change detection and object-oriented feature extraction. Manual review and editing of the dataset is still required, including verification directly with companies. For more information, click here.