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
Applied natural resource management and the conservation of forests, freshwater ecosystems, and wildlife (especially aquatic species) are common themes found throughout my research.
The intended outcome these projects is to not only produce robust, peer-reviewed scientific findings, but to ensure that these findings can be communicated in plain language with applications for policy makers.
Forests and Fish
1. Riparian forest management 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 freshwater and land is known as the "riparian zone," and is one of the most important habitat components for aquatic species. Intact, forested riparian areas protect aquatic ecological integrity by buffering impacts from terrestrial land-use activities and providing shade in the summer months. Salmonid fish species that have evolved in Mi'kma'ki, such as Atlantic salmon and brook trout, are cold water specialists threatened by high temperature events in rivers.
This project uses remote sensing, habitat surveys, and seasonal freshwater monitoring data to better understand how riparian forest management influences temperature dynamics in adjacent freshwater fish habitat of varying attributes (e.g., stream width, timber harvest method, buffer size, forest regeneration age). Climate forecasting will be used to demonstrate how riparian forest management may influence water temperature at fine spatial scales and at different greenhouse gas emissions scenarios.
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. Aquatic connectivity is also especially important for diadromous fish species that migrate hundreds of kilometers from the open ocean to upper tributaries in river systems to complete their life cycle.
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, culvert surveys, and benthic macroinvertebrate sampling to evaluate the impacts of forestry road networks on habitat connectivity and food web dynamics for freshwater and migratory 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 policy and freshwater ecosystems
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. Transboundary freshwater mining pollution: law and policy
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.
