Understanding the impacts of permafrost thaw on surface water flux and storage

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The subarctic region of north-western Canada is one of the most rapidly warming on Earth. The permafrost of this region is thawing at unprecedented rates causing damage to roads, air strips, ferry crossings, pipelines, and buildings, while transforming land covers and disrupting the water cycle. For example, in the peatland-dominated region of discontinuous permafrost in the southern Northwest Territories, permafrost thaw is transforming large areas of forest into wetland, enabling wetlands to drain, and the flow of streams and rivers to rise. Considering that land cover characteristics strongly affect water flow and storage processes, and that permafrost is the foundation of much of the land cover in this region, the thaw and disappearance of permafrost has profound implications for the region's water cycle. However, regulatory authorities, resource management boards, and communities are ill-equipped to respond effectively to this new and growing challenge, because there is little or no permafrost thaw monitoring, adaptation or predictive capacity in the region, and therefore no appropriate basis for decision support. As a result, there is an urgent need to investigate thaw-induced changes to land and water, develop and mobilise knowledge on these changes, develop predictive modelling tools, and provide interactive training to decision makers and other stakeholders. In direct response, this research programme will co-develop and co-implement (with Indigenous communities and other northern end-users) new knowledge on permafrost distribution, thaw, thaw-induced land cover change, and resulting hydrological impacts; in addition to high-quality public data sets, and customised knowledge-based predictive tools and innovative adaptation and risk management strategies. Each of these will be customised to meet the specialised decision support needs of the study region so that environmental and resource management strategies can be confidently applied. It is expected that the products of this research programme will also have wide applicability throughout the circumpolar subarctic.