Grant: Canada Research Chairs

Canada’s Boreal region is home to ~2.7 million people, including ~600 Indigenous communities, and is a significant contributor to Canada’s economy. Historically, this highly diverse landscape has had secure and clean water resources but rapid increase in the frequency and severity of climatic and environmental disturbances are threatening these resources. As our climate warms, it is predicted that some disturbances, such as wildfires, will become more severe and create unprecedented compound disturbances through interactions with other climatic and environmental disturbances. However, our understanding of how multiple disturbances interact to impact the provision of clean water in Boreal Canada remains an unanswered question and has been identified as a national research priority. Where ecosystems meet, ecohydrological interfaces, are known to be highly influential spatial patches in controlling water quality and quantity but are very sensitive to disturbances. Essentially, ecohydrological interfaces are likely the “landscape taps” that control the provision of clean water in Boreal Canada. Yet, our understanding of the interlinked physical and chemical processes that govern water quality, and how disturbance alters these processes, from these taps is poor. The proposed research of the Canada Research Chair in Climate and Environmental Change aims to unravel how multiple disturbances impact water resources by improving our process-based understanding of the interactions between water quality/quantity, ecohydrological interfaces, and environmental disturbances in an era of climate change. To do this, prevalent northern contaminants (e.g., mercury), nutrients, and carbon will be measured in several nested watersheds along a space-for-temperature (latitude) gradient. This will act as an approximation of climate change from the Mixed Hardwood Forest in the south to the Boreal Forest in the north. At smaller spatial scales, the processes controlling the release of contaminants, nutrients, and carbon, from uplands through ecohydrological interfaces to surface waters will be determined at key areas along the gradient. To support the field-based science, the Mercury and Ecohydrology Research Laboratory will be established at Nipissing University. Through untangling the interacting processes that govern water quality, we will be better able to adapt and mitigate compounding disturbances to secure water resources for millions of Canadians.