Grant: Canada Research Chairs

From clean drinking water to regulating our climate to storied vistas rich in diverse plants and animals - Canada is blessed with nature's gifts. But how best do we sustain the benefits of nature for future generations against human-caused climate change? Answering this question requires understanding how organic material is cycled among its major reservoirs in vegetation, soils, oceans, and the atmosphere.As a Canada Research Chair, my research team and I will discover how two of the most important global pools for organic materials - northern soils and freshwaters - will respond to climate change. Our work will integrate state-of-the-art tools in genomics (e.g. third-generation sequencing), analytical chemistry (ultra-high-resolution mass spectrometry), and informatics (e.g. artificial intelligence) to track large-scale associations between organic molecules and microorganisms and forecast how they might change into the future. We will understand the processes underlying these changes with experimental manipulations of entire catchments and identify their wider consequences for water, forestry, and fisheries resources.This research will inform environmental policy and management about how best to protect the benefits that northern ecosystems deliver to people. Furthermore, we will identify opportunities for nature-based solutions to mitigate rapid climate change and provide information to improve global climate models.