Lake sediments and legacy environmental stressors

湖泊沉积物和遗留环境压力源

• 批准号: RGPIN-2022-03758
• 负责人: Kurek, Joshua
• 金额: $ 3.13万
• 依托单位: Mount Allison University
• 依托单位国家: 加拿大
• 项目类别: Discovery Grants Program - Individual
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 加拿大
• 起止时间: 2022-01-01 至 2023-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ase-oro/Details-Detailles_eng.asp?id=754867
• 关键词: Lake; sediments; legacy; environmental; stressors

My research program will use aquatic sediments and other key watershed measures to study how lakes respond to environmental change over time. Legacy pollution from human activities in Canada has resulted in damage to many freshwater ecosystems, including their food webs. Although signs of ecosystem recovery are observed, many lakes now experience multiple, co-occurring environmental stressors because of human activities. A long-term time perspective is often needed to understand environmental change because it tends to occur incrementally over many decades. Lake recovery from two well-documented examples of pollution in the Maritime provinces of Canada, insecticides used in forestry and contaminants from gold mining, will be the focus of my research program over the next five years. These examples of widespread chemical and metal(loid) pollution have relevance to other regions of Canada where similar activities occurred in the past. Understanding sediment-bound pollution impacts and how lake recovery occurs are important to assessing aquatic health, recognizing risk, and developing remediation plans for polluted ecosystems. We will use invertebrates and geochemical signatures preserved in dated sediment cores to investigate pollution trends and how contemporary stressors, such as climate change and land use, may influence the ecological recovery of lakes across the 20th century to the present. Methods common to geoscience and aquatic science will be applied to determine the timings of environmental changes, and their impacts relative to "baseline" or typical aquatic conditions. Our approach provides new knowledge on how temperate lake ecosystems may recover from severe pollution while also facing modern environmental stressors.

我的研究计划将利用水生沉积物和其他关键流域措施来研究湖泊如何随着时间的推移对环境变化做出反应。加拿大人类活动造成的遗留污染已对许多淡水生态系统（包括其食物网）造成损害。尽管观察到生态系统恢复的迹象，但由于人类活动，许多湖泊现在面临着多种同时发生的环境压力。理解环境变化通常需要长期的视角，因为它往往会在几十年内逐渐发生。加拿大沿海省份两个有据可查的污染案例（林业使用的杀虫剂和金矿开采的污染物）中湖泊的恢复将是我未来五年研究计划的重点。这些广泛的化学和金属（类）污染的例子与过去发生过类似活动的加拿大其他地区有关。了解沉积物污染的影响以及湖泊恢复的发生方式对于评估水生健康、识别风险和制定污染生态系统的修复计划非常重要。我们将利用陈年沉积岩芯中保存的无脊椎动物和地球化学特征来研究污染趋势，以及气候变化和土地利用等当代压力源如何影响 20 世纪至今湖泊的生态恢复。将应用地球科学和水生科学常用的方法来确定环境变化的时间及其相对于“基线”或典型水生条件的影响。我们的方法提供了关于温带湖泊生态系统如何从严重污染中恢复同时面临现代环境压力的新知识。