Ecological Monitoring Landscape Technician III Job Listing at City of Edmonton in Edmonton, AB (Job ID 54610)

Description

Are you passionate about preserving urban biodiversity and leading a team of dedicated ecological professionals? The City of Edmonton is looking for an Ecologist to join our Parks and Roads Services team. In this role, you will play a vital part in protecting our local wildlife and natural areas while ensuring our operational teams can work effectively within legislative frameworks and asset management processes. If you are a collaborative leader with a deep understanding of ecological land management, we invite you to help us balance operational excellence with environmental stewardship.

As the Ecologist for the Ecological Monitoring team within the Restoration and Ecology Team, you will lead a diverse team of technical professionals, including coordinators, foresters, and technicians. Your primary focus will be providing direction on regulatory, operational and policy implementation regarding biodiversity monitoring and wildlife interactions in coordination with Enviso. You will oversee the development of best practices and mitigations to ensure all work aligns with internal policies and provincial or federal legislation. This role is essential for navigating the complexities of urban land management, such as protecting critical wildlife habitat and informing long term restorative activities, while maintaining city assets. By bridging the gap between ecological requirements and operational needs, you will ensure the long-term health of Edmonton's natural areas and open spaces.

What will you do?

• Provide day-to-day supervision, recruitment, and training for a professional technical team, including Natural Areas Coordinators, Urban Foresters, Landscape Technicians, Professional Biologists and biological science technicians
• Coordinate Field Evaluations: Oversee the wildlife monitoring team to conduct sweeps, ensuring work zones are safe for operations or recommend field mitigation efforts to take to operational areas. This includes liasoning with operational and technical leaders across the Corporation
• Lead the creation or modification of policies related to natural areas management, such as the City-Wide Natural Areas Management Plan
• Lead the operational implementation of the monitoring components and inform restorative activity operational process flows as outlined in A Greener Edmonton Plan; working closely with the Naturalization Planting and Establishment and Natural Area Operations teams within Restoration and Ecology Operations and other business areas
• Develop monitoring programs for site monitoring that aligns with site specific management plans in order to develop operational work plans
• Build and administer a biodiversity monitoring program to verify and understand the long-term ecological health of our natural spaces
• Manage program reporting, create standard operating procedures (SOPs), and respond to inquiries from community members
• Provide operational / technical expertise on a variety of City led natural area related strategic projects and land use circulations
• Coordinate monitoring and operational work planning with teams in Parks and Urban Forestry Operations Planning and Monitoring, Enviso, Ecological Planning and other teams across the Corporation; including incorporating drone technology and data collection into monitoring programs
• Oversee training of staff in using natural area datasets (including GIS)
• Natural area work accomplishment and inventory reporting (including performing queries in GIS)
• Liaison with GIS data management teams to ensure natural area and naturalization related GIS datasets are accurate and up to date, and the data the Restoration and Ecology team captures and requires for reporting is stewarded accurately