Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

The Province of Ontario has recently identified Wellington County as an area to focus urban growth in southern Ontario under the "Places to Grow" initiative. As a consequence, the combined population of the City of Guelph and Wellington County is projected to increase rapidly by 85,000 people to a population of >280,000. This unprecedented rate of growth will not only strain water and wastewater infrastructure, it is likely that the primary receiver in Wellington County, the Speed River, may not have sufficient assimilative capacity to receive the additional wastewater effluent without the risk of serious environmental degradation. This proposal is a proactive research initiative to evaluate tissue and whole organism responses associated with exposure to emerging contaminants in wastewater discharges in fish communities adjacent the City of Guelph Wastewater Treatment Plant on the Speed River. We propose a two year plan to explore the spatial and temporal responses in fish communities exposed to Guelph wastewater effluent through multi-season field assessments regularly sampling impacted and reference fish communities. This plan will also monitor physiological and reproductive changes in a sentinel species (greenside darter, Etheostoma blennioides), one of the most ubiquitous members of the Speed River fish community. These field studies are supplemented by controlled cage/lab experiments which will evaluate both the mechanism behind population and community-level changes in wild fish, and establish exposure thresholds for endocrine disruption in wastewater effluent. As bioactive compounds found in wastewater effluents are anticipated to be an emerging issue with increasing urban densities, the proposed study is expected to form the basis for future research integrating remedial action and evaluating the efficacy of wastewater treatment for the protection of aquatic ecosystems. While the results of this research are of immediate relevance to the City of Guelph and other researchers working on this water body, information gleaned from this project is also directly applicable to other studies investigating the impacts of intensive urban development on Canadian inland water systems.