Impacts of Recent Climate Warming on Canada's Northern Aquatic Environments

加拿大北部未来的气候变暖将对北部水域产生重大影响，了解这些变化将如何影响对北方人如此重要的淡水资源是很重要的。该计划将在广阔的空间和时间尺度上研究最近的气候变暖如何影响加拿大北部湖泊的营养物质、污染物和有机物的流动。短期目标是：(1)开发新的化学标记物来跟踪从其集水区进入湖泊的有机碳输入，包括黄片类化合物、萜类化合物和木质素衍生的酚类物质，可以表征集水区内陆源(异地)有机质的来源；(2)确定海岸线扩张和森林淹没对大奴隶平原低地生态区污染物和碳通量的影响，该地区因永久冻土融化而受到地面沉降的影响；以及(3)利用这些标记物重建湖泊沉积物中过去的环境变化，并确定这些来自集水区的碳输入是否与湖泊中的污染物和养分输入有关，这些研究将解决一些重要问题，这些问题将提高我们评估加拿大北部(和其他地区)淡水如何应对气候变化的能力，并将帮助我们预测进一步气候变暖的影响。

Future climate warming in Canada's north will have a great impact on northern waters, and it is important to understand how these changes will affect freshwater resources that are so important for northerners. This program will examine, on broad spatial and temporal scales, how recent climate warming is affecting the flow of nutrients, contaminants, and organic matter in Canada's northern lakes. The shorter term objectives are to (1) develop new chemical markers to track organic carbon inputs to lakes from their catchments, including flavenoids, terpenoids, and lignin-derived phenolics that can characterize the origin of terrestrially-derived (allochthonous) organic matter within the catchment; (2) determine the impact of shoreline expansion and forest submergence from thawing permafrost on contaminant and carbon fluxes to lakes in the Great Slave Plain lowland ecoregion, an area that has been affected by ground subsidence due to thawing permafrost; and (3) employ these markers to reconstruct past environmental change in lake sediments and determine whether these carbon inputs from the catchment relate to contaminant and nutrient inputs in lakes Collectively, these studies will address important questions that will improve our ability to assess how freshwaters in Canada's North (and elsewhere) are responding to climate change and will help us to predict the impacts of further climate warming.