Research program
Clean freshwater is a critical ecosystem service and healthy coasts are essential to providing livelihoods for humanity. As aquatic ecosystem ecologists, our research focuses on understanding the stocks and flows of elements within and across different ecosystems: from land to rivers and lakes to the atmosphere to coasts. We are particularly interested in how major biogeochemical cycles are coupled and how physical features in the landscape as well as plants, and organisms influence their stoichiometry in the context of global change.
Social-ecological understanding: making ecosystem science applicable to society
Lakes, ponds, rivers, streams, springs, bogs and wetlands are all examples of freshwater ecosystems that offer a number of ecosysrtem services that people often take for granted. For example, they can control flooding, purify water, stabilize shorelines and sequester carbon dioxide.
As Canada Research Chair in Aquatic Ecosystem Science and Sustainability, Dr. Roxane Maranger aims to protect freshwaters and their ecosystem services by identifying how connections between watersheds and variations in size and shape can cause lakes and river networks to be less vulnerable to the pressures of development and climate change. By developing new approaches to assess aquatic ecosystem shapes at large spatial scales, she and her research group want to determine the watershed development thresholds that can lead to abrupt changes in the abilities of aquatic ecosystems to process the carbon and nutrients that influence ecosystem services. As an Art of Hosting practitioner, Maranger uses social innovation techniques to co-develop knowledge products with various stakeholder groups through use inspired ecosystem science. Ultimately, they hope to uncover better ways to protect freshwater ecosystems from environmental stressors and develop guidance to support the sustainability of freshwater resources.
As Canada Research Chair in Aquatic Ecosystem Science and Sustainability, Dr. Roxane Maranger aims to protect freshwaters and their ecosystem services by identifying how connections between watersheds and variations in size and shape can cause lakes and river networks to be less vulnerable to the pressures of development and climate change. By developing new approaches to assess aquatic ecosystem shapes at large spatial scales, she and her research group want to determine the watershed development thresholds that can lead to abrupt changes in the abilities of aquatic ecosystems to process the carbon and nutrients that influence ecosystem services. As an Art of Hosting practitioner, Maranger uses social innovation techniques to co-develop knowledge products with various stakeholder groups through use inspired ecosystem science. Ultimately, they hope to uncover better ways to protect freshwater ecosystems from environmental stressors and develop guidance to support the sustainability of freshwater resources.
Eutrophication of surface watersEutrophication is the process where excess nutrients enter aquatic ecosystems, results in the proliferation of algae and the consumption of oxygen. We study the historical use of nutrients, their retention in the watershed and their loading into receiving waters and try to understand how best to mitigate their use in the landscape to protect receiving waters. Projects range from evaluating nutrient control points and legacies in watersheds, nitrogen influences on cyanobacterial blooms and toxicity, the role of plants in sequestering nutrients among others.
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Linking ecosystem function and structure
Part of our program also assesses how community structure (and biodiversity- largely through an effect functional trait approach) influences the biogeochemical cycling of nitrogen and carbon. This enables us to better understand how changes in organisms and plants will impact ecosystem function. Projects include evaluating how the functional traits of plants, protists and zooplankton, the functional genes of microbes, invasive species and fish influence biogeochemical cycling.
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Aquatic ecosystem services
Freshwaters and coasts provide essential ecosystem services to humanity, but several anthropogenic impacts result in their degradation. Current work is trying to assess the trade-offs among multiple ecosystem services and best categorize (aquatic regional) ecosystem services using biophysical metrics. We also plan to evaluate how ecoservices are influenced in the context of climate change, and provide solution pathways that protect them now and into the future. This ongoing work was initiated through a collaboration with Ouranos and the Lake Pulse Strategic Network.
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Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from aquatic systems and climate changeLakes, rivers and oceans absorb and emit greenhouse gases. Although there has been a strong emphasis on the role of carbon gases, we have focused our energies on the production (or consumption!) of N2O from various aquatic ecosystems or considered the influence of all of the climatically important GHGs simultaneously. We are particularly interested on the impact of climate change, community structure and seasonality on GHG production. Indeed we think climate is influencing systems in counterintuitive ways!
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Carbon cycling in Arctic and SubarcticMicrobes process a fraction of C in the ocean, primarily through respiration. We have carried out several projects in the ocean looking at the factors that influence microbial C processing and the influence of climate change. We are currently assessing how changes in convective overturn influences the process of deep C sequestration through the microbial pump as well as how microbial community structure influences that role. This work is part of the pan-Canadian project VITALS (Ventilation Interactions and Transport in the Labrador Sea).
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