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

未来加拿大北部的气候变暖将对北部水域产生巨大影响，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。这个项目将在广阔的空间和时间尺度上研究最近的气候变暖是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的。短期目标是：(1)开发新的化学标记物，以跟踪从集水区向湖泊输入的有机碳，包括黄酮类、萜类和木质素衍生的酚类物质，这些物质可以表征集水区陆源（异域）有机质的来源；(2)确定多年冻土融化导致的岸线扩张和森林淹没对大奴平原低地生态区污染物和碳通量的影响，该地区已受到多年冻土融化造成的地面沉降的影响；(3)利用这些标记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营养物输入有关。总的来说，这些研究将解决重要的问题，这些问题将提高我们评估加拿大北部（和其他地方）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.