Development and Application of Periphyton-Based Biomonitoring Methods to Elucidate Aquatic Ecosystem Responses of Lakes in a Water-Rich Northern Landscape (Old Crow Flats, Yukon, Canada) to Climate Change

• Main Author: Mohammed, Wathiq
• Format: Doctoral or Postdoctoral Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: University of Waterloo 2022
• Subjects: Periphytic diatoms; Artificial-substrate samplers; Shallow lakes; Thermokarst lakes; Old Crow Flats; Biomonitoring; Arctic; Yukon; Canada; Climate change; Gwitchin; Ice; Old Crow; permafrost; Subarctic; Thermokarst
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10012/18950

Shallow freshwater lakes are abundant in Arctic and subarctic regions, where they provide important wildlife habitat and sustain the cultural heritage and traditional land use of Indigenous communities. Concern over effects of climate change on shallow northern lakes, including warming and associated increase of evaporation and shifts in precipitation, however, elicits a need for agency-led, long-term, biomonitoring programs to implement protocols applicable across large, remote landscapes. My research focuses on lakes of the Old Crow Flats (OCF), a 5,600 km2 lake-rich thermokarst landscape in northern Yukon recognized as a Ramsar Wetland of International Importance for ecosystem services provided to wildlife and the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation (VGFN). There, climate warming has raised uncertainty about sustainability of traditional activities in the landscape and challenges natural resource stewardship. The research employs analysis of periphytic diatom community composition accrued on artificial-substrate samplers and water chemistry in lakes of the Old Crow Flats (Yukon Territory, Canada), where spatial and temporal variation in input water sources and water balance has been characterized using water isotope tracers, to explore the ability of diatoms to discern ecological responses to shifts in basin hydrology. The findings are reported in two data chapters. One chapter explores spatial variation across a set of lakes that span the hydrological gradients of OCF during ice-free seasons of 2008 and 2009. The other chapter assesses temporal variation at 14 lakes during a 12-year-long monitoring period (2008-2019) when water isotopes document increasing input of rainfall and possibly permafrost thaw on their water balance. Results of multivariate analyses based on the spatial data set (33 and 48 lakes sampled in 2008 and 2009, respectively) demonstrate that water chemistry and diatom community composition differ among three isotope-defined hydrological lake categories based on differences in input water sources ...