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

据报道，貂皮是新斯科舍省最大的农产品出口产品，在收入方面仅可与乳制品相媲美。然而，许多居民、流域组织和非政府组织将水貂养殖与区域淡水中反复出现的藻类繁殖、水质差和鱼类栖息地下降联系在一起。两极分化的辩论仍在继续，因为监管机构和当地利益相关者因缺乏长期水质数据而受到阻碍。我们的总体目标是发展“法医古湖沼学”领域，并将我们的新的、专注于时间的方法与预测性湖泊建模相结合。我们将与HQP和当地利益攸关方合作，使用现有的和新开发的“指纹”工具，我们将继续改进这些工具，以确定水貂养殖场(相对于其他农业径流来源和土地利用变化的来源)对营养物质、金属和持久性有机污染物(POP)的相对贡献，这些物质可能导致藻类大量繁殖和水质全面恶化，包括潜在的鱼类栖息地丧失和水生食物网的改变。这项建议将大学研究人员和具有不同专业知识的合作伙伴(例如，模型师、工程师、生物学家、化学家、古生物学家)和当地知识联系起来，开发独特而互补的工具，以重建过去、研究现在，并对可能受到水貂养殖、历史农业/土地利用变化和气候变化影响的湖泊的未来水质轨迹进行建模。与我们的合作伙伴合作，我们的战略湖泊选择将使我们能够在适当的时间和空间尺度上为监管机构和利益相关者提供关键信息，以确定管理和潜在的额外缓解政策，以帮助解决关于水貂养殖场环境影响的两极分化辩论。该项目开发的技术将很容易出口到加拿大的其他农业区和其他面临水质问题的地方。

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.**