Grant: Research Tools and Instruments

Climate change is warming the Arctic at rates 3-4 times faster than the global average, bringing with it a diversity of complex challenges for wildlife. We have been studying a cold-specialist rapidly-declining Arctic songbird - the Snow bunting - as a rapid-response "canary in the coal mine" model for assessing the impacts of environmental change in the Canadian Arctic. Unfortunately, our recent work on heat tolerance of high Arctic buntings is already raising alarms. Notably, our work suggests that above a temperature of only 11.7°C buntings will be forced to reduce offspring feeding rates to avoid overheating. As a result, breeding success will be impacted with knock-on effects to populations. This discovery is even more concerning considering that birds in much of the low Arctic already face temperatures exceeding this threshold. At the same time, accelerated urbanization and development of the low Canadian Arctic over the past two decades is expected to hasten warming through urban heat island effects with as yet unknown impacts to performance, fitness and population health. In response to these critical gaps, we began monitoring a low Arctic bunting population breeding along an urban gradient in Nunavut's capital city, Iqaluit in 2022. We are now proposing to use requested RTI support to fund the first of its kind mobile research and training lab to provide researchers with the mobility and equipment to collect vital missing environmental, physiological and behavioural data in the field to build and field-test heat tolerance models quantifying the impacts (or possibly advantages) of low Arctic urban life on the performance and fitness in this Arctic songbird. We have developed three goals to maximize the success of a new mobile Arctic songbird research and training lab in Iqaluit. First, we must collect data to quantify heat tolerance levels for snow buntings in the low Arctic. Without this data we cannot predict at which temperatures bunting parents will need to begin protecting themselves from overheating by limiting feeding rates to offspring. Second, we need to field-test heat tolerance predictions to determine how novel urban challenges and climate change interact to impact the success of low Arctic buntings. Third, we crucially need to use the above collective information to estimate whether the heat tolerance limitations of this cold-adapted species will limit its continuance as a breeding bird in Canada. Without this information we will have no ability to accurately understand how at risk this species is over its range in the Canadian Arctic. As such, we risk underestimating the long-term population effects of human change on this and other rapidly declining Arctic songbirds.