Grant: Strategic Projects Supplemental Competition

Northern rivers and lakes are under increasing pressures from environmental stressors but their effective management, including the ability to predict adaptive capacity of ecosystems and to identify appropriate interventions, continues to be hampered by inadequate and yet fundamental knowledge to characterize current ecological conditions. Benthic Algal Bioassessment Protocols will be developed for use in rivers and lakes of Canada's North to monitor changes in water quality and ecological integrity affected by human impacts and climate change, and will contribute to the Canadian Aquatic Biomonitoring Network (CABIN) to be implemented in selected northern National Parks beginning in 2008. In partnership with Parks Canada, rivers located in and adjacent to Nahanni National Park and lakes in Vuntut National Park and the adjacent Old Crow Flats Special Management Area will serve as pilot studies because the current health of these ecosystems maybe threatened by multiple environmental stressors and planned research complements ongoing related studies.  Water bodies will be sampled for water chemistry and benthic algae over a two-year period (2008-09) and analyzed to define current aquatic ecosystem conditions and explore their inter-annual variability. Findings will be used to generate cost-effective bioassessment protocols (i.e., sampling, analyzing, reporting) for long-term biomonitoring programs for use throughout northern Canada, which is of interest to numerous user groups including industry, government agencies, conservation authorities, private citizen groups and local First Nation communities. Such programs are essential to maintaining environmental sustainability of freshwater resources, and have a myriad of other applications, including the evaluation and prediction of the adaptivecapacity of aquatic ecosystems to environmental stressors and establishing the foundation for informed science-based environmental policy. No protocol currently exists for benthic algal monitoring in northern Canada, yet creation of an early warning system via biomonitoring and bioassessment activities will empower water managers to be proactive versus reactive in their efforts to mitigate aquatic ecosystem degradation.