"Development of a new biological indicator of land-use change, road-salt contamination and mine tailing remediation"

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Biological indicators are important tools in detecting and documenting agricultural, industrial and residential land-use change. Thecamoebians, a group of shelled protozoans, comprise one such group that are found in a wide array of aquatic environments from lakes and ponds to peatlands and damp soils. Among this group agglutinating forms, primarily arcellacea, have shells that are highly resistant to decay and thus fossilize well, a characteristic that potentially makes them valuable as tools to trace the environmental history of lakes. There have been very few systematic studies carried out that test the response of thecamoebians to specific gradients (e.g. phosphorous loading, metal contamination, pH, temperature, road salt contamination) and no attempt has been made to use them quantitatively to reconstruct particular lake environmental parameters over time. The focus of my research program through the next five years will be to develop lake thecamoebians as an effective proxy in the detection and documentation of land use change, road salt contamination and mine-tailings remediation. The research will involve a series of studies in regions of Canada where previous reconnaissance research has shown that specific environmental gradients exist that can provide the baseline for the more systematic research that will comprise this research program. This research program will be novel and of significance in that it will; 1) provide an improved understanding of the ecology of thecamoebians in small lakes and damp forest soils, and an evaluation of their potential for monitoring land use change; 2) develop thecamoebians as a quantitative tool in monitoring contamination levels in agricultural, urban and industrially contaminated settings, and for assessing the success of remediation attempts in mine tailing polluted lakes, and 3) determine the utility of thecamoebians as bio-indicators of salt contamination in lakes, and to develop them as a quantitative tool for salt contamination monitoring.