• Alexa is participating in Envirothon, Canada's largest highschool science competition, again this year with our first workshop at Mactaquac Provincial Park September 22nd, 2009. Persons interested in participating in Envirothon are invited to get in touch with Alexa at their convenience!
• Alexa is attending the ATW workshop in La Malbaie, Charlevoix, QC, September 27 to 30th, 2009. If anyone needs a ride, let me know!
• Joseph Culp and Eric Luiker from Environment Canada and CRI Fredericton and Daryl Halliwell from Environment Canada’s Saskatoon office spent a week in mid-July collecting algae, invertebrates and water samples from 27 Arctic streams in Sirmilik National Park on Baffin Island. The research is part of the International Polar Year project Arctic BioNet which is a research network focused on increasing our understanding of Arctic freshwater biodiversity along a latitudinal gradient ranging from the eastern Canadian High Arctic to the subarctic.
Dea Chute and Allison Ritcey near a large glacier in the McCornick River valley, northern Labrador. • Allison Ritcey from CRI Fredericton returned to northern Labrador this summer to complete field sampling for her MSc thesis on the ecosystem structure and function of streams in the Torngat Mountains National Park. The aims of her research are to establish patterns in algal biomass production and organic matter decomposition, and to investigate how these processes relate to food chain length, complexity and diversity. Establishing ecological patterns will provide the basic understanding of these systems that is needed to predict climate change impacts that may affect Arctic charr and will also aid development of the Park’s freshwater biomonitoring program. This summer Allison had lots of fun working with Inuit students and Elders and enjoyed running a student workshop on stream ecology alongside Dea Chute from the Curry lab!
• Research is currently being conducted by Dr. Culp and Dr. AdamYates (Environment Canada, Burlington) to evaluate how community structure and function and ecosystem processes in tributaries of the Red river affects the transmission, retention and removal of nutrients. Tributary watersheds of the Red river are heavily used for agriculture and have been hypothesized to be important sources of nutrient input to Lake Winnipeg. Ecological monitoring tools will be developed to allow evaluation of the effectiveness of current and future management activities. Water chemistry, instream metabolism, benthic macroinvertebrates as well as stream and riparian plants are all being sampled in 2009 and 2010 along the longitudinal profiles of two southern Manitoba tributaries to the Red River and a study of approximately 20 Manitoba subwatersheds is being initiated in 2010 to determine how differences in the extent and type of nutrient releasing human activity relate to ecological condition (i.e., instream metabolism, benthic macroinvertebrate community structure, N15/N14 ratios of invertebrates and plants). Together these two research components will enhance understanding of instream nutrient dynamics in the tributary streams of the Red River Basin in support of the Lake Winnipeg Basin Initiative (LWBI) objective of addressing and managing non-point source contributions of nutrients in the watershed and ultimately to the lake.
