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

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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.