This image is meant to capture some of the major research themes of the Facility for Ecoinformatics Research. It merges two other images. The first is a high resolution digital photograph of Vanessa atalanta, which is nectaring on an Echinacea flower. The second image is a national land cover/land use map of Canada, part of which has been added as a layer over the right, outer wing surfaces of the butterfly. The region of Canada that covers this wing surface is southwestern Alberta, which is the biodiversity hotspot for butterflies in Canada where habitat heterogeneity and butterfly species turnover are highest. I isolated the background around the butterfly and used a stained glass filter on it to create that mosaicked quality.

A good deal of our research, but by no means all of it, uses butterflies as a focal taxon. Remote sensing, especially at moderate and coarse resolutions, are central to much of our work. We use data from SPOT, MODIS, and Landsat in particular but AVHRR data still have a role. The stained glass effect in the background can represent the distinctive quality of data that remote sensing provides - useful, often quite beautiful (to me, at least), but subject to all kinds of biases, blurriness, mixed pixels, and so on. Similar criticisms could be levelled at almost any system of measurement. The overall purpose of this image is to illustrate how blending the best data from many sources can help one to paint particularly compelling ecological pictures. Post-modernism is not dead, however, so there is room for additional interpretation.