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

据报道，水貂皮是新斯科舍省最大的农产品出口产品，其收入仅次于乳制品。然而，许多居民，流域团体和非政府组织将水貂养殖与区域淡水中反复出现的藻类水华，水质差和鱼类栖息地下降联系起来。由于缺乏长期水质数据，监管机构和当地利益攸关方受到阻碍，两极分化的辩论仍在继续。我们的总体目标是发展“法医古湖沼学”领域，并将我们新颖的、以时间为重点的方法与预测性湖泊建模相结合。与我们的HQP和当地利益相关者合作，我们将使用现有的和新开发的“指纹识别”工具，我们将继续完善这些工具，以确定水貂养殖场的相对贡献（相对于农业径流和土地使用变化的其他来源）可能导致藻类大量繁殖和水质全面恶化的营养物质、金属和持久性有机污染物，包括鱼类栖息地的潜在丧失和水生食物网的改变。该提案将大学研究人员和具有不同专业知识的合作伙伴联系起来（例如，在这方面，我们将利用现有的技术（包括建模人员、工程师、生物学家、化学家、古湖泊学家）和当地知识，开发独特但互补的工具，以重建过去，研究现在，并模拟可能受到水貂养殖、历史农业/土地使用变化和气候变化影响的湖泊的未来水质轨迹。通过与我们的合作伙伴合作，我们的战略性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其他农业地区和其他面临水质问题的地区。

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.**