At the core of this research program is a partnership between the University of Guelph and Ecological and Regulatory Solutions.
A cross-functional research program at the University of Guelph might hold the key to better environmental health assessments.
Dr. Robert Hanner, professor in the Department of Integrative Biology, College of Biological Science and director of the Biodiversity Institute for Conservation Synthesis (BICS), is validating a faster, more economical method for natural resource companies to measure their environmental impacts.
“Whenever we’re developing resources, we have to think about sustainability and environmental effects monitoring,” says Hanner. “That’s what this project is really all about. Supporting the ability of industries to undertake environmental effects monitoring in a sensitive, cost-effective and scalable way.”
In Canada, mining and other resource-based industries are required by the Fisheries Act to carry out environmental effects monitoring programs. Because these industries produce runoff and discharge wastewater, companies must determine how much pollution they’re generating and make sure it falls below certain thresholds to protect aquatic habitats.
But traditional testing methods for these programs are slow, expensive and come with challenges.
In partnership with Ecological and Regulatory (Ecoreg) Solutions, a Guelph-based environmental consulting firm specializing in water quality, aquatic resource sustainability and environmental assessments, Hanner and team will compare the effectiveness of advanced DNA-based methods at determining species composition in freshwater bodies compared to traditional taxonomic methods.
The goal is to see whether DNA-based methods perform just as well or better than the current ones. If they do, they can be standardized, adopted by regulatory agencies and integrated into environmental monitoring and baseline programs for faster, more comprehensive and less expensive assessments.
Improving environmental testing methods
Hanner and his team – including Dr. Yoamel Milián-García, postdoctoral researcher, Drs. Sarah Adamowicz and Karl Cottenie, professors in the Department of Integrative Biology, and Helga Sonnenberg, founder and chief executive officer, Ecoreg Solutions – are conducting one of the first large-scale comparison studies of traditional methods and molecular DNA-based methods for identifying benthic invertebrates.
Benthic species are small aquatic animals and insects living at the bottom of lakes and rivers. They are used in environmental biomonitoring assessments because their presence and characteristics indicate the health of aquatic ecosystems. If populations of benthic species are declining, so is the water quality.
Hanner says traditional identification methods for benthic species are labour-intensive, costly and require specialized expertise, making them hard to scale up.
“Current approaches rely on taxonomists to identify benthic invertebrates at their most basic level and manually count them,” he says. “But it’s not always possible to identify species in their juvenile forms, and there aren’t enough experts who can do this work. We expect molecular methods will be more sensitive and give us more refined taxonomic information so we can leverage this expertise to make the identification process accessible, rather than having it be a bottleneck.”
Streamlining the species identification process not only helps companies meet testing requirements, but it also opens capacity for more frequent biomonitoring and earlier interventions to protect freshwater sources and their ecosystems.
Empowering natural resource industries
With the support and expertise of Ecoreg Solutions, the team will visit up to 10 mining and pulp and paper sites in Canada that perform environmental effects monitoring and compare three methods side-by-side: traditional identification methods, molecular methods that sequence DNA for all organisms identified in a sample, and molecular methods that analyze environmental DNA samples to identify specimens – an approach known as eDNA metabarcoding.
“Our goal is to validate the molecular methods, make an inarguable case that they produce the same results as the traditional way, and publish our findings in the scientific literature so they can be more easily adopted,” says Sonnenberg. “We also want to create a publicly available, technical guidance document that industries, agencies and regulators can use.”
Although the project is being done at mining and pulp and paper sites, the outcomes are relevant to all industries that practice aquatic biomonitoring, including hydropower and wastewater management facilities.
The DNA data collected will also build upon reference libraries of species in freshwater ecosystems, which can help detect invasive species or manage species at risk. Specifically, it will help expand the public library of DNA reference sequences in the Barcode of Life Database, hosted by U of G’s Centre for Biodiversity Genomics.
Sonnenberg says, “Whether you’re a taxonomist, an environmental scientist, a conservation biologist or an operation that wants to do efficient monitoring to make better environmental decisions around your site, these methods could have significant value to offer.”
This research project is part of a larger program supported by $1,149,369 in funding from the Ontario Research Fund – Research Excellence (ORF-RE) and $1,260,000 in joint Natural Sciences and Engineering Council (NSERC) Alliance-MITACS Accelerate grants, plus in-kind contributions.
“The outcomes of this research have the potential to transform environmental biomonitoring practices in Ontario and across Canada,” says Dr. Shayan Sharif, interim vice-president, research and innovation. “Biodiversity and ecological health are core focus areas for the University and this generous support from the federal and provincial governments, together with industry partners, will help us strengthen our contributions to the science by leveraging the expertise that U of G has to offer.”