New assessment tools combining forensic paleolimnology, biotransport, and predictive modelling to determine potential impacts of mink farming in rural Nova Scotia

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Mink pelts are reported to be Nova Scotia's greatest agricultural export and are comparable only to dairy products in terms of revenues. However, many residents, watershed groups, and NGOs associate mink farming with recurring algal blooms, poor water quality, and declining fish habitat within regional freshwaters. Polarized debates continue as regulators and local stakeholders are hampered by the lack of long-term water quality data. Our overall goal is to develop the field of "forensic paleolimnology" and integrate our novel, time-focused approaches with predictive lake modelling. Working with our HQP and local stakeholders, we will use both established and our newly developed "fingerprinting" tools, which we will continue to refine, to determine the relative contributions from mink farms (as opposed to other sources of agricultural runoff and land-use changes) of nutrients, metals, and persistent organic pollutants (POPs) that may lead to algal blooms and overall deterioration of water quality, including potential loss of fish habitat and alteration of aquatic food webs. This proposal links university researchers and partners with diverse expertise (e.g., modellers, engineers, biologists, chemists, paleolimnologists) and local knowledge to develop distinct, yet complementary, tools to reconstruct the past, study the present, and model future water quality trajectories in lakes potentially affected by mink farming, historic agriculture/land-use shifts, and climatic change. Working with our partners, our strategic lake selection will allow us to provide regulators and stakeholders with the critical information, at appropriate temporal and spatial scales, to determine management and potential additional mitigation policies needed to help resolve the polarized debate on the environmental impacts of mink farms. The techniques developed in this project will be readily exportable to other agricultural regions in Canada and elsewhere faced with water quality issues.