FAQs
Welcome
Watershed Sentinel is pleased to make available the Sentinel Hotspots website. It is an online resource for citizens - for community members, government, and media.
Review the map and the site, but please don't leave without giving us some feedback. Sentinel Hotspots is only good if people find it useful, so we need to know what is useful for you.
Sentinel Hotspots is a valuable tool in increasing awareness of environmental issues in western Canada. Our magazine, Watershed Sentinel, is the best environmental journal in Canada. You can support both, and get consistently excellent coverage of environmental issues, five times a year, by subscribing to Watershed Sentinel. Only $25 a year. Please click here, now.
We welcome your comments (click on the contact menu item), as well as your suggestions for hotspots (submit).
We are grateful to the Glasswaters Foundation for making this project possible. And to you, for your invaluable support.
Thank-you,
Delores
Delores Broten, Editor and Publisher, Watershed Sentinel
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Sentinel Hotspots website?
Explain the Categories and Types of Hotspots
Hotspot Categories, Types, and Markers used in Sentinel Hotspots
Why do I get ugly black shadows under the info pop-ups?
What is the Sentinel Hotspots website?
Sentinel Hotspots is an online resource about environmental issues in Western Canada. It is for citizens - community members, government, and media.
A Hotspot must meet two criteria: 1. a place where activities and proposed activities do or may have an impact on the environment, and 2. about which there is active concern, where effort is being made by community members and/or environmental organizations, to identify and address the issues, and fix the problems.
Sentinel Hotspots facility derives from a practice at meetings of the BC Environmental Network in the 1990s, at which members had 3 minutes, in front of a map of BC, to identify their hotspots and tell their peers from around the province about it. The result was a fertile mix of ideas and tactics, across regions and between issues. The Sentinel Hotspots website is an attempt to use the internet to supply that overview, starting with western Canada.
Explain the Categories and Types of Hotspots
Grouping and categorizing things is never a perfect art. We have attempted to place a framework of Categories and Types over hotspots. These are not rigid, and they will change to best accommodate the real hotspots. A table is provided below of the Hotspots Categories, Types, and the markers used for each on the maps.
A group is not actually a hotspot itself, but where a number of hotspots appear in the same geographic area, and are related, usually by government policy, they form a group. A group is made up of individual hotspots. A number of individual hotspots may belong to a single group. Two examples are: the BC Government's Pacific Gateway program, which consists of a number of airport, port, road, and rail infrastructure components; and the BC Government's "Northern Energy Corridor" in which at least two major pipeline projects are envisioned running from north of Prince George to the west coast at Kitimat.
If clustering is turned on in the system, a cluster marker (at left) replaces a number of individual hotspots markers where they are too densely located on the map. Clicking on the cluster marker will zoom in the map to at least one individual hotspot markers and optionally to one or more cluster markers.
Hotspot Categories, Types, and Markers used in Sentinel Hotspots
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Note: linear infrastructure - pipelines, railroads, roads, and transmission lines - are indicated with rectangular markers. All other hotspots use the round marker.
Why do I get ugly black shadows under the info pop-ups?
When Google Maps are displayed in Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) browser at any zoom level other than 100%, extra shadows appear under the info windows ("pop-ups") in solid black. This does NOT occur in other browsers, and does NOT happen in IE when viewing at the normal or 100% zoom level. Note also that the maps and pages in Sentinel Hotspots are designed to be viewed at 100%. Also note that we are talking about the browser zoom level, not the map zoom in, zoom out function.
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