Towards a regional monitoring framework for cumulative impacts assessment in the Southern Gulf of St. Lawrence: monitoring fate and effects of agrichemicals

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Estuaries and coastal zones are under environmental pressures internationally due to urban development, agriculture, and climate change. In the Southern Gulf of St. Lawrence sediments, nutrients and contaminants from land have been observed to have significant adverse impacts on these environments. Foremost among high risk contaminants are pesticides that are highly toxic to invertebrates, particularly crustaceans such as lobster. The collapse of lobster populations in parts of the Northumberland Strait and changes to fish and invertebrate populations and the detection of pesticide residues in local estuaries provide strong preliminary evidence to support the hypothesis that pesticides may be exerting significant impacts on the nearshore marine environment in the Southern Gulf. Biological tools using ecologically and economically important crustacean invertebrates, namely lobster and amphipods, will be used to evaluate the sensitivity of these invertebrates to