From 3 Hours to 30 Seconds: A One-Click Site Location Map Tool for Alberta

By Phaseview | Published April 20, 2026

Site location maps should not take more than 30 seconds.

Every remote site in Alberta needs one – be it for reporting requirements, safety forms, permit applications, fieldwork planning, surface lease submissions, incident reports, or a dozen other situations where "where exactly is this site?" needs to go on paper. And somehow, in 2026, they still take way too long.

Try it now: phaseview.ca/map?tool=sitelocation – free while it's in beta, no credit card, no per-map limit.

Two bad options, plus the one we built

When you're putting together a report, a safety form, or a permit application for a remote Alberta site, you typically have to choose between two bad options.

Option A – "do it properly." You or someone who specializes in GIS loads the layers into ArcGIS or QGIS, gets the framing right, adds all the fluff and details, maybe does a little georeferencing, plays around with the scale bar, exports once, realizes the LSD grid was missing, and after more time than you'd like to admit, you wind up with an acceptable map to pass off to a client.

Option B – "good enough." A 20-minute quick-and-dirty screenshot in Google Earth. Draw a few lines and labels on. Maybe add an inset if you're feeling spicy. Technically correct. Looks like it came from 2006. You wish you could do better, but at least your time goes somewhere more useful.

Option C – what we built. Two clicks, 30 seconds, and you have a report-ready figure: a site-detail panel, a regional panel with the nearest settlement and auto-calculated distance, and a provincial inset. Want to draw a custom lease polygon? Swap to a different nearby settlement? Those options are built in. Professional-quality output for any location in Alberta, every time.

No more reinventing the same figure on every project.

Who needs a site location map in Alberta?

Basically anyone who works outside a city limit and has to put on paper where they were, where they're going, or what the site boundary looks like.

Environmental consultants – Phase 1 and Phase 2 Environmental Site Assessments, reclamation certificate applications, remediation proposals and completion reports. See our primer on Alberta environmental report types and our guide to finding existing Phase 1 ESAs.
Field operations teams – safety forms (JHAs, FLHAs, pre-job hazard assessments), daily site briefings, field-work planning documents.
Permit applicants – pipeline and telecommunication line crossing submissions, industrial permit applications and amendments, surface lease applications, land-use permits.
Regulatory filings – AER incident reports, spill reports, notifications of construction, compliance inspection packages, reclamation certificate exhibits.
Engineering and construction – rural building permit drawings, temporary access road submissions, site inspection reports.
Land surveyors and land agents – lease site sketches, client-facing location summaries, parcel overview figures.
Forestry and agriculture – cutblock plans, grazing lease proposals, water-use permit applications, crown-land referrals.
Utilities and renewables – power line corridor submissions, cell tower and fiber-deployment packages, solar and wind project documentation.
Emergency response and operations planning – pre-job access maps, contractor orientation figures, emergency response plan maps.

Any time the question "where exactly is this site?" needs to go on paper and look like it was made in this decade, you need a site location map. And you probably need it today.

What the tool actually does

You open the map, click your site (or paste in a Legal Land Description like 02-10-032-04 W4M), and get a PDF in under 30 seconds. The output is a landscape-letter, three-panel figure: site detail on the left, regional context with the nearest named settlement and auto-calculated distance in the middle, and an Alberta provincial inset on the right. UTM coordinate axes on all four sides of the detail panel. A proper title block. Same visual standard every single time.

You can draw or import a lease boundary polygon, and the tool will calculate its area in hectares and include both the polygon and the summary stats in the PDF. Historical imagery from the Esri World Imagery Wayback service is available as a preview layer if you need a pre-disturbance visual reference. Colors for the extent box, lease polygon, and LSD grid persist in your browser, so your output matches your firm's visual standards across projects. If your site has multiple nearby settlements at similar distances, you can cycle through the nearest options and pick the one that makes the most sense for your report.

If you want to see the legal-land-description system that underpins the whole tool, we wrote a primer on the Alberta Township System – the tool is a practical application of the 4.1-million-polygon ATS grid.

The manual workflow, step by step

For the benefit of anyone who hasn't done this lately, here's what actually happens between "need a site location map" and "PDF attached" when you do it yourself in ArcGIS or QGIS:

Find the ATS shapefile. The Alberta Township System grid is the foundation. You download it from AltaLIS or a government portal, georeference if the CRS is wonky, and load it into your GIS project. If your firm has a centralized version, it's probably a year old.
Georeference the basemap. Satellite imagery (Bing, Esri, SentinelHub) plus ATS grid plus any site-specific vector data. Make sure projections align – NAD83 10TM vs UTM vs WGS 84 is a common foot-gun.
Find the nearest named settlement. Either a manual visual check against a populated-places layer, or a proper distance matrix query. Either way: set up the layer, run the analysis, verify the result isn't a ghost town or a survey marker.
Build the print layout. Three map frames: site detail (usually 2-3 km radius), regional context to nearest town, provincial inset. Set scales. Lock extents. Add title block. Position legend. Add scale bar. Add north arrow. Add company logo. Reposition everything because the legend overlapped the map.
Fix everything that's wrong on first export. The scale bar doesn't show a round number. The UTM labels are on two sides instead of four. Three of the LSDs didn't label because of label collisions. Re-export.

Every step is reasonable. The problem is doing all of them every single time, for every single site.

How it works (for the technically curious)

Under the hood, the Site Location Map Tool is doing a few things that aren't obvious:

ATS polygon lookup across 4.1M rows. The full Alberta Township System, down to Legal Subdivision level (16 subdivisions per section, 36 sections per township, about 4.1 million polygons in total), is indexed in PostgreSQL with PostGIS spatial indexes. A click anywhere in the province resolves to the containing LSD via a single spatial index query.
Nearest-settlement query via PostGIS. A curated 1,500+ Alberta settlement dataset (based on NRCAN populated-place data, deduped and with obvious false positives removed) is indexed and queried with ST_DWithin plus a distance sort. The distance is calculated as a geodesic on the PostGIS geography type, not a projected straight line, because Alberta is large enough for the difference to matter.
Three Mapbox GL maps rendered client-side. The three panels are rendered in hidden DOM containers in your browser at a fixed 2000×2000-pixel canvas, captured as JPEG data URLs, and sent to the backend along with the map-state metadata for PDF composition. Each panel has its own configurable zoom preset (from Quarter Section up to Township scale for the detail panel).
UTM axes are generated programmatically. Not a scale bar – a proper coordinate graticule with easting on the top/bottom and northing on the left/right, labelled in kilometres. It adapts to the panel extent automatically.
Wayback imagery for preview. If you want to see the site as of a specific historical date, the tool can render the in-browser preview against the Esri World Imagery Wayback service. The final exported PDF uses current Mapbox satellite imagery because Wayback tiles can't be bundled into the server-side PDF pipeline due to CORS restrictions.
Style persistence. Your color picks live in localStorage, so the third location map you generate this week looks like the second one.
ReportLab PDF composition. The final PDF is composed with ReportLab, vector-first, with the captured map images composited in alongside the vector title block, coordinate graticule, distance call-outs, and metadata – meaning everything except the basemap stays sharp at any print size and the file stays small enough to email.

If you want to know more about how we built the ATS indexing side, reach out – we're happy to talk pipeline.

Free tier and what's gated

The Site Location Map Tool is currently free while it's in beta. No credit card, no per-map limit, full feature access. You just need a Phaseview account to export the PDF – which takes about 30 seconds and gives you access to the rest of the platform too.

Pricing will land once the tool is out of beta. Beta users get grandfathered access to a generous free tier when that happens – we're building this for the same people who were stuck with the manual ArcGIS and QGIS workflow, not to gate it behind a price point that only the big firms can justify.

FAQ

Is this only for environmental consultants? No. Anyone generating a site location map for an Alberta project – oil and gas operations, pipeline construction, forestry, utilities, surveyors, rural contractors, emergency response, municipal works – gets the same output. The figure a regulator expects is the same whether you're filing a Phase 1 ESA, a surface lease application, or a safety form.

Can I use this for safety forms and field-level hazard assessments? Yes. Generate the PDF, attach it to your JHA or FLHA, and field crews have an actual location figure instead of "see attached Google Earth screenshot." The same output works for pre-job orientations, daily site briefings, and emergency response packages.

Can I edit the output in ArcGIS or QGIS? Yes – it's a standard PDF, so you can drop it into a print layout in either program and adjust. We're also looking at adding a GeoJSON export of the site geometry and lease boundary for full GIS round-trip. Let us know if that's a priority for you.

Is this output regulatory-compliant? The output is regulatory-formatted – it includes the components (title block, coordinate grid, distance to nearest settlement, inset) that Alberta regulators and clients expect on site location figures. Actual regulatory review and QA is still your job, and no tool replaces professional judgement. Think of this as your template, automated.

Does it support lease boundaries, not just point sites? Yes. You can draw a polygon directly on the map or import one from GeoJSON. The tool will calculate the area in hectares and include both the polygon and the summary stats in the PDF.

What about sites near the SK or BC border? The Alberta Township System grid extends right up to the provincial boundaries. Sites within Alberta work as expected. Sites across the border (into BC or SK) aren't currently supported because they use a different legal land description system.

Can I use my company's colour scheme? Yes. The tool includes a style picker for the extent box, lease polygon, and LSD grid colours. Your choices persist in your browser so every subsequent map matches.