Grant: Canada Research Chairs

Human impacts on the Earth’s ecosystems are now so pervasive the UN has declared 2021-2030 the Decade of Ecosystem Restoration, building on the growing global acceptance that degraded ecosystems are not fully recovering and human-driven climate change has placed us in a ‘code red’ state of emergency. Freshwater ecosystems serve as model systems to explore mechanisms behind restoration delay and success, Dr. Catherine Febria will build on the successes of her first term as CRC to continue to address urgent challenges to the health of waterways. Headwater streams connect land, water and people and are strategic places for science and societal engagement. In the first term as a CRC, Febria successfully launched a now globally recognized program centering local and Indigenous knowledge in restoration science and practice. In complement, she demonstrated how carbon and especially dissolved organic matter (DOM) fluorescence has the potential to serve as an effective indicator of ecosystem restoration in human-impacted watershed. Febria will engage local communities across focal watersheds (Windsor-Essex, Sydenham, Grand) to identify a diversity of sites undergoing restoration, conservation, farming and/or management as part of a knowledge co-production research process and informed by local knowledge on ecosystem health status. In parallel, Febria and her team will characterize water quality and biodiversity indicators with a focus on carbon as dissolved organic matter (DOM). The extent to which DOM fluorescence can serve as a proxy of carbon transport and fate from land into water will be explored; further, optical properties of DOM will serve as an intermediate indicator of restoration and management. This effort will build on data gathered from more than 125+ streams, drains, rivers and wetlands across a land-use (urbanized, agriculturally-impacted) and restoration gradient in the first term. This research will engage in knowledge syntheses to help inform and advance implementation and testing of restoration approaches in the region, and also apply ecological network theory to visualize the partnership networks in each watershed. The program will be distinct locally and globally for its commitment to effective science translation, changes in policy and practice that engage EDI+ principles and advance reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples, Lands and Water.