Development and application of hydrological and limnological monitoring in lake-rich landscapes of Canada’s subarctic National Parks

• Main Author: White, Hilary Emma
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: Scholars Commons @ Laurier 2019
• Subjects: hydrology; limnology; monitoring; national parks; lesser snow geese; subarctic; Environmental Monitoring; Arctic; Canada; Changing Lake; Yukon; Climate change; Subarctic; Vuntut national park; Wapusk national park
• Online Access: https://scholars.wlu.ca/etd/2176; https://scholars.wlu.ca/context/etd/article/3295/viewcontent/Hilary_White_PhD_Dissertation_Wilfrid_Laurier_University_June_26.pdf

Arctic and subarctic environments are being adversely influenced by human-caused climate change across our entire planet. Canada’s northern freshwater ecosystems are influenced by a variety of environmental stressors and are particularly sensitive to climate change, since small shifts in climate have the potential to substantially alter their hydrological, limnological, and biogeochemical conditions. Some other indirect effects on northern freshwater landscapes are the expansion of vegetation as well as changes in wildlife and waterfowl populations and distribution. It is, therefore, critical to understand the observed and predicted influences of climate change and other environmental stressors on these northern freshwater environments dominant in arctic and subarctic landscapes, since they are considered productive northern “oases” and provide important habitat for wildlife and natural resources for indigenous communities. Concerns have been increasing regarding climate change, rapidly changing lake levels, and the associated effects on aquatic ecological integrity within two of Canada’s northern lake-rich national parks, Vuntut National Park (VNP), Yukon Territory, and Wapusk National Park (WNP), Manitoba. To address these issues, Park-led monitoring programs have been established to track status and trends of lake hydrological conditions using water isotopes, yet there remains a need to translate these data into a format that can be used by Parks Canada for their reporting requirements. Here, a novel water isotope-based lake hydrological monitoring program is applied that directly encompasses Parks Canada’s long-term monitoring protocols and provides a sensitive way to detect hydrological change. Lake category (VNP - ‘snowmelt-dominated’, ‘rainfall-dominated’, or intermediate and WNP - coastal fen, interior peat plateau, or boreal spruce forest) and season-specific (spring, summer, fall) water isotope-based hydrological thresholds were used to establish the condition (‘good’, ‘fair’, ‘poor’) of Parks Canada’s ...