RESEARCH
Releasing wild stock endangered Atlantic salmon into Napu'saqnuk (St. Mary's River, Nova Scotia). Video credit: Scott Beaver, St. Mary's River Association (October, 2022)
Projects
The intended outcome these projects is to not only produce peer-reviewed scientific findings, but to ensure that these findings can be communicated in plain language with applications for policy makers.
Forestry and Atlantic salmon
1. Riparian zone disturbance and climate resiliency
Partners: St. Mary's River Association, Nova Scotia Salmon Association, Nova Scotia Department of Natural Resources & Renewables, Fisheries and Oceans Canada (2023 - current)
The transitional area between water and land is known as the riparian zone, an important habitat component for aquatic species. Forested riparian areas protect rivers by buffering effects from land disturbance and providing shade in the summer months. Salmonid fish that naturally evolved in Mi'kma'ki, such as Atlantic salmon and brook trout, are cold water specialists threatened by warming rivers. However, the degree to which riparian zone disturbance alters river temperature is unknown in the Wabanaki (Acadian) forest region.
This project uses remote sensing and field data to understand how riparian forest management influences temperature dynamics in fish-bearing headwater streams.
Weather and stream temperature monitoring equipment deployed in Napu'saqnuk (St. Mary's River) in May 2024
2. Forestry road crossings and freshwater habitat
Partners: St. Mary's River Association, Nova Scotia Salmon Association, Nova Scotia Department of Natural Resources & Renewables, Fisheries and Oceans Canada (2023 - current)
The Wabanaki (Acadian) forest region has a complex network of rivers and thousands of kilometers of unpaved roads. Culverts are the most common structures used to allow continued water flow when streams intersect with newly constructed roads. However, water passing through a culvert does not guarantee that stream habitat quality is maintained.
The impacts of road networks on biotic and abiotic components of freshwater fish habitat are not well understood in the Wabanaki forest. This project seeks to fill knowledge gaps through remote sensing, field surveys, and benthic macroinvertebrate sampling to evaluate the impacts of forestry road networks on habitat connectivity and food web dynamics for freshwater fish.
Co-supervised BSc Honour's thesis from this project: Bleyer, R. (2024, April). Identifying and prioritizing barriers to Atlantic salmon habitat connectivity in Napu’saqnuk (St Mary’s River), Mi’kma’ki (Nova Scotia, Canada). [Faculty of Graduate Studies Online Theses, Dalhousie University]. Dal Space. http://hdl.handle.net/10222/84014.
Culvert survey in Napu'saqnuk (St. Mary's River) in October 2022
Mining, Impact Assessment, & Freshwater
1. A loophole in British Columbia's Environmental Assessment Act?
Partners: Northern Confluence Initiative, Wilburforce Foundation (2020 - 2022)
There is a little known clause in BC's Environmental Assessment Act that can allow a company to make significant physical changes to their natural resource extraction projects after the conclusion of an environmental assessment (EA). This process is known as an 'amendment,' and often occurs with less scientific and public scrutiny than the original EA. We used mining projects as an example to investigate how often amendments were occurring and what types of predicted effects they could be having on freshwater resources throughout BC. This involved digging through hundreds of pages of documents posted on BC's project registry.
Of the 23 mines that were approved via the environmental assessment process in BC between 2002 and 2020:
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14 (61%) of mines received amendments after-the-fact
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20 (out of 48 total) amendments were approved that were likely to have impacts on freshwater ecosystems.
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some of the changes allowed by amendments included increased discharge of effluent into river systems, destruction of wetlands, and extraction of groundwater supplies.
Read the recommendations to resolve this loophole in our full article, published open-access in FACETS.
2. International law and transboundary mining pollution
The headwater coal mines in BC's Elk Valley have contributed to decades of selenium pollution in the freshwater ecosystems of the transboundary Canada / United States Elk – Kootenai River watershed, evidenced in part by the $60 million fine imposed on Teck Resources Ltd. under Canada’s Fisheries Act in 2021 for the ‘deposit of deleterious substances.'
We applied principles of international law to formulate a two-part conclusion in the form of (1) a short-term solution to effectively facilitate a resolution of transboundary mining pollution in the Elk – Kootenai River watershed; (2) a long-term solution to settle future disagreements regarding transboundary pollution between Canada and the United States.
Read our recommendations here, published open-access in the Journal of Environmental Law and Policy.
