This webinar was originally recorded on December 6, 2023 for the Freshwater Stewardship Community webinar series: [ Ссылка ]

Over the past few decades there has been a rise in confirmed reports of cyanobacterial (blue-green algal) blooms in Ontario waterbodies. These blooms can reduce the recreational and property value of affected waterbodies, alter aquatic food webs, contaminate drinking water, and pose serious health hazards. Although nutrient pollution is the most common driver of nuisance cyanobacterial blooms globally, a high proportion of cyanobacterial blooms occurring in oligotrophic (low nutrient, spring total phosphorus less than 10 µg/L) waterbodies in Ontario suggests that there may be links to climate warming, including increased water temperatures, reduced wind speed, and a longer ice-free season, rendering conditions more favourable for these blooms to occur. This seminar will demonstrate how subfossils of algae and invertebrates preserved in lake sediments can be used to reconstruct long-term trends in nutrients, oxygen, primary production, and effects of climate change, to periods pre-dating direct water column measurements, allowing the investigation of environmental drivers for the observed increasing prevalence of cyanobacterial blooms in the 21st century.

Liz Favot is an aquatic scientist in Sudbury, Ontario, who has worked for the provincial and federal government in various roles over the last three years, ranging from helping to coordinate a freshwater community science monitoring program (the Ontario Lake Partner Program), to research, to fisheries policy, to industrial compliance assessment. Liz received her PhD from Queen’s University in 2021, where her research utilized paleolimnology (environmental indicators stored in lake sediments) to reconstruct multi-century trends in nutrients, oxygen, and primary production, and investigate the environmental triggers for recent cyanobacterial blooms in oligotrophic and minimally disturbed lakes. In her spare time, Liz serves to represent eastern Canada (ON, QC, NB, NS, PE, NL) on the board of directors of the North American Lake Management Society.



___


Connect with Watersheds Canada online!

FACEBOOK: [ Ссылка ]
TWITTER: [ Ссылка ]
INSTAGRAM: [ Ссылка ]
LINKEDIN: [ Ссылка ]
YOUTUBE: [ Ссылка ]

WEBSITE: [ Ссылка ]

свернуть