A project that integrates Indigenous knowledge and a technology developed by researchers at the University of Guelph is helping to assess the health of the river systems in Canada. The collaborations are part of a multi-year environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding project called STREAM—Sequencing The Rivers for Environmental Assessment and Monitoring. By metabarcoding key lifeforms that live at the bottom of rivers, called benthos, the team can monitor the health status of waterways in little-researched areas of Canada. This project is made possible due to contributions from citizen scientists, including dozens of members of Indigenous communities, who collect samples from the river systems around them.
In turn, the community partners are helping to gather key data that can be used over time by all of STREAM’s partners to monitor freshwater health. To analyze river health, trained citizen scientists across Canada collect bulk samples from benthos that are analyzed through metabarcoding for the presence of the larvae of macroinvertebrates, including mayflies, stoneflies, and caddisflies. Since these larvae are sensitive to a variety of environmental disturbances, healthy populations can indicate good water quality. Poor populations may indicate the waterway has been subject to nutrient pollution from agricultural runoff, resource extraction, or the effects of climate change.
“We can turn around results to a community group within two months using metabarcoding, which is several times faster than methods that use microscopes to analyze single organisms,” said Chloe Robinson, a postdoctoral fellow in the Hajibabaei Lab who is also STREAM’s project coordinator. Hundreds of samples were collected in the project’s first year (2019) with many more expected in 2020. The research team hopes to partner with more Indigenous groups to generate a national framework for metabarcoding analysis to assess the health of all waterways, from Newfoundland to British Columbia.
Source: Water Canada
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