Grant: Alliance Grants

Aquatic ecosystems house significant biodiversity, provide many ecosystem services, and contribute to human health and economic well-being of many communities, yet are being degraded by multiple environmental stressors including pollution, invasive species, habitat loss and water diversion, and climate change. Our Alliance grant would create and test, a new, cost-effective, integrated toolbox to monitor aquatic ecosystems in Eastern Ontario in near real time. These new tools, tailored for the needs of our partners, will include: i. newly designed unpiloted aerial vehicles (UAV) for sampling remote water bodies up to 10 kms from the operator; ii. new environmental DNA (eDNA) genomics methods for aquatic diversity including Next Generation sequencing metabarcoding quantitative PCR, and digital PCR; iii. a new eDNA laboratory at our partner The River Institute with a cadre of staff trained in molecular methods; and iv. a network comprising The River Institute, Thousand Islands National Park, Mohawk Council of Akwesasne - Environment Program, First Nations Technical Institute, and the Invasive Species Centre together with a platform for community participation. Our system fully implemented and network of organizations and collaborators will: i) Provide early-warning systems for the presence of novel aquatic invasive species at the primary stages of invasion; ii) Allow for detection of harmful algal blooms at their earliest stages to allow for early remediation action; iii) Create a means to detect and monitor cryptic and rare species-at-risk; iv) Allow for monitoring aquatic ecosystems including diversity across trophic levels and the ability to evaluate change against baseline data; and v) leave a legacy of young scientists and community members trained in eDNA and biodiversity assessment. While our focus is regional the tools that we create and the framework that we develop and implement will serve as a model for other regions within Ontario, Canada and globally.