Grant: Alliance Grants

Universities, and professors in particular, are excellent at collecting data. However, we are less talented at sharing and making public the data that was collected with primarily public funds. Unfortunately, while new policies are put in place for data archiving with new publications and new project financing, very significant amounts of data are currently sleeping in binders, drawers and hard drives in university laboratories and offices across Canada. With this project, a broad group of researchers are working together to leverage available university data in order to describe the patterns of carbon sequestration and how it interacts with biological diversity for a sector that is being targeted for protected area by a First Nation, the Abitibiwinni Anicinabe First Nation, because of the significant amount of carbon stored in its peat soils, the biodiversity of its forest and peatland ecosystems, and to protect the Detour-Kenogami caribou herd, whose territory crosses the Ontario-Québec border north of the 49th parallel. The targeted area has been the subject of multiple MSc and PhD Theses, and postdoctoral research done at different universities over the last 20 years. By combining this existing data we will be able to generate several results: 1) a unified spatialized data base built to the specifications of the Abitibiwinni Nation; 2) two synthesis articles highlighting the transversal biodiversity patterns (i.e. across kingdoms) and the impact of the different disturbances across the territory on these patterns; 3) an interactive map highlighting these different elements and 4) will propose a new way to integrate carbon sequestration and storage and biodiversity data to inform conservation management.