August 7, 2019  —You know what they say: "If you build it, they will come." But that old adage isn't just for haunted baseball fields – it also applies to wetland projects right in the heart of Ottawa's greenbelt. Last fall, staff at the RVCA and the National Capital Commission created 10,000 square metres of new wetland habitat along Stillwater Creek, just south of the new DND headquarters off Moodie Drive and Highway 417. Thanks to observations from the Ottawa-Carleton Wildlife Centre, which is located nearby, staff at the NCC and RVCA discovered the wetland had been suffering annually from extreme low water conditions. Most of the year the wetland was completely dry, dominated by long, reedy…

July 29, 2019 – Custom-built smartphone apps are changing the way staff at Rideau Valley Conservation Authority get their work done – and saving time, money and headaches in the process. This spring, the RVCA launched its latest app, this one for classifying shorelines – something no other conservation group is doing digitally. Gone are the bulky clipboards and windswept papers of previous surveys. And vanquished are the days of tedious data entry after a long season on the water. These days, with the tap of an app staff can quickly analyze a shoreline, take a photo and input all the relevant data into a digital database, all from the…