the WAM network: AN EARLY WARNING SYSTEM & LANDSCAPE SCALE DESIGN AID

Freshwater ecosystems provide essential ecosystem services, including flood control, climate regulation, and waste processing, while also acting as reservoirs of biodiversity and drinking water. They are, however, among the most threatened environments in the world. The Great Lakes is one of the largest freshwater ecosystems on the planet, and plays a central role in North America's economic, and cultural heritage. The removal of wetlands, and the growing conversion of natural habitats has resulted in the accelerated movement of water through watersheds. In turn, climate change is producing extreme precipitation events that can exacerbate the speed and extent of this flooding. This fast water hyper-connects land to water inflating the movement of nutrients, organic matter, and pollutants into freshwater ecosystems, amplifying environmental issues (e.g., harmful algae blooms, biodiversity destruction). The proposed Watershed Assessment and Management (WAM) network will provide cutting-edge instrumentation and technical expertise to assess the environmental impacts of land use that have created fast water landscapes throughout Canada. This network, involving six universities (Guelph, Lakehead, Toronto, Ontario Tech, Trent, Windsor) and the Experimental Lakes Area (ELA), will utilize a genes-to-ecosystem approach to develop predictive landscape scale data that will serve as both: i) an early warning system for looming environmental impact, and; ii) produce models that aid landscape scale design.

THE APPLICANT TEAM

TODD GILLIS, university of guelph

Dr. Gillis (Co-PI) was educated in Canada at the University of Guelph (BSc, MSc), Simon Fraser University (PhD) and the University of Washington (Post Doctoral Fellow). As a Professor at the University Guelph, Dr. Gillis and his students study the mechanisms that regulate the response of aquatic animals to changes in environmental conditions and to pathological stressors. Studies supported by NSERC, since 2005, have examined the consequences of temperature change, hypoxia, and injury on cellular and tissue function as well as whole animal responses. This work utilizes molecular and proteomic approaches as well as the use of cardiac ultrasound and swim assays to measure aerobic performance. In addition, Dr. Gillis has been supported by the Department of Fisheries Oceans (> $3 million) since 2013 to study the sublethal consequences of bitumen exposure on multiple life stages of Pacific salmon. This work has provided the first data characterizing the impact of environmentally relevant levels of diluted bitumen on the development, health and aerobic fitness health of these culturally, and economically, important fish. Dr Gillis is also the Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Encyclopedia of Fish Physiology (Elsevier) published in 2024 (227 chapters, 2400 pages and >350 Authors), an Associate Editor of the Journal of Comparative Physiology, and is on the Editorial Boards of Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology, Current Research in Physiology and the Journal of Thermal Biology. Dr. Gillis is also a member of the Center for Ecosystem Management. Finally, Dr. Gillis was the Associate Dean of Research in the College of Biological Sciences at the University of Guelph from 2019-2022.

BAILEY MCMEANS, university of toronto

Dr. McMeans (Co-PI) is an aquatic ecologist studying the effects of temporal environmental variation on organisms up to whole food webs. She’s particularly interested in how naturally occurring seasonality and shortened winter periods arising under a changing global climate alter organismal behaviors such as habitat use, diet and activity rates. She applies acoustic telemetry to study fish movements and a suite of biomarkers (e.g., bulk and compound specific stable isotopes, fatty acids, mercury) to quantify energy and contaminant flow through food webs. Dr. McMeans’ study systems include Arctic, temperate and tropical locations, all of which share large seasonal fluctuations in temperature, light or precipitation.

Most recently, her research has focused on freshwater fishes inhabiting temperate lakes. She’s a PI on an NSERC Alliance grant that established a globally unique acoustic telemetry array spanning three connected lakes and five fish species in Algonquin Park, Ontario, Canada. The partnership between four universities (University of Toronto, University of Guelph, University of Windsor, Queens University), the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry, and Department of Fisheries Oceans Canada is generating novel, high resolution data on the responses of culturally, recreationally and economically important fishes to ongoing climate variation from the scale of hours to multiple years. By exploring the diverse behavioral responses of aquatic organisms to temporal variation, their research has shed new light on the mechanisms underpinning biodiversity maintenance and sustained functioning in dynamic aquatic ecosystems. Future directions include expanding our acoustic array beyond lakes and into their connecting streams and rivers. This information is important for identifying the capacity of fishes to move between systems, which could be a critical component of their adaptive capacity. Such a landscape level perspective would dramatically advance our ability to identify what species traits and system characteristics increase vulnerability to climate change.

SARAH ALDERMAN, university of guelph

Dr. Alderman received a PhD in Zoology from the University of Guelph, Canada, where her research investigated the molecular regulation of the endocrine stress response in teleost fish. Following post-doctoral studies at the Universities of Waterloo and British Columbia, Canada, she is now Assistant Professor in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of Guelph. Dr. Alderman’s research program uses advanced molecular and cytological approaches to study how environmental stressors affect the form and function of vertebrates, including the mechanisms that regulate adult neurogenesis in zebrafish and the physiological consequences of crude oil exposure in salmon. In addition, she uses quantitative omics approaches to identify novel bioindicators of stress and organismal health for applications in fish management and conservation. Dr. Alderman is a member of the Editorial Board for the peer-reviewed journal Aquatic Toxicology and a senior member of the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Committee for the Canadian Society of Zoologists.

AARON FISK, university of windsor

Dr. Aaron Fisk is a Professor and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Changing Great Lakes Ecosystems in the School of the Environment at the University of Windsor. His research focuses on aquatic food webs, the movement of fish, and the cycling of contaminants in the environment, mainly on the Great Lakes and in the Arctic. He uses chemical tracers to understand and predict the influence of physical, chemical, and biological processes on aquatic food webs and acoustic telemetry to quantify the distribution and movement of fish and marine mammals to better understand how  animals and ecosystems adapt to environmental variability and respond to anthropogenic changes. In turn, he has provided managers and policy makers with key insights into the types and locations of important habitat that required enhanced protection, real-time monitoring, and definition of distributional boundaries. Dr. Fisk is the Science Director of the Realtime Aquatic Ecosystem Observation Network (raeon.org), part of the Global Water Futures Observatory (GWFO.ca) and a board member of the Great Lakes Observing System (glos.org). He has published over 300 journal articles and secured more than $100 millon in funding during his career.

SCOTT HIGGINS, iisd-ela

Dr. Higgins is a Senior Research Scientist at the IISD Experimental Lakes Area (IISD-ELA), a globally unique facility that specializes in undertaking large scale ecological experiments on natural ecosystems to evaluate and find solutions to water quality problems. He’s an active researcher at the IISD-ELA and has engaged in large multi-disciplinary projects on the drivers of eutrophication including the role of microelements such as iron, oil spill effects to freshwater food webs and efficacy of clean-up methods, and the effects of microplastics and antimicrobial agents on freshwater food webs.

Dr. Higgins also manages IISD-ELA’s Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) program that encompasses meteorology, hydrology, and limnology and co-manages their in-situ monitoring program that utilizes modern instrumentation (meteorological sensors, water quality sondes, in-situ wet chemistry sondes, etc.) to collect high frequency data. In collaboration with external researchers and those at IISD-ELA, he uses these data to evaluate long-term variability and climate effects on freshwater ecosystems from regional to global scales.

MICHAEL RENNIE, lakehead university

Dr. Rennie is an Associate Professor and Tier II Canada Research Chair in Freshwater Ecology and Fisheries at Lakehead University. As lead researcher of the CEE Lab, Dr. Rennie oversees his team’s use of whole-lake experiments, lab studies and archival data sets to investigate how lakes and fish populations respond to ecosystem changes such as climate warming, invasive species and contaminants. He is also the acting director of Lakehead’s Aquatic Toxicology Research Centre. Dr. Rennie is also a Research Fellow with the International Institute for Sustainable Development-Experimental Lakes Area (IISD-ELA), where he oversees the fish population monitoring program and the site of many of CEE Lab members’ field studies and whole-lake experiments. He is also an Adjunct Professor in the biological sciences department at the University of Manitoba.

Dr. Rennie’s research group (www.ceelab.ca) seeks to understand the fundamental linkages between metabolic performance of individuals and ecosystem-level processes, and how these relationships change in altered environments. Human activities affect ecosystems through multiple pathways of effects, or stressors, which in turn alter the physiological performance of individuals (e.g., activity, feeding efficiency, growth and reproduction) and community composition. Changes at both scales have direct consequences for the pathway and efficiency of energy flow through food webs. Using a combination of fish tracking technology, hydroacoustics, respirometry, calorimetry, computer modelling and life history theory, we seek to demonstrate the mechanistic relationships between individual, population and ecosystem-level traits. While most monitoring programs evaluate the response of organisms at the cellular or individual level, they are managed at the population and ecosystem level; as such, understanding the links between these disparate levels of organization are critical for effective ecosystem management. Dr. Rennie’s involvement in the current grant helps establish these critical links between scales (cellular, individual, population and ecosystem). 

DENINA SIMMONS

Dr. Simmons was appointed to the Faculty of Science at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology in July 2018, where she is currently a Tier II Canada Research Chair in Aquatic Toxicology and runs the Aquatic Omics Lab. Her research at Ontario Tech focuses on pairing non-targeted bioanalytical chemistry with non-lethal sampling and observational science to understand the health of aquatic animals. In addition to being a recipient of the Ontario Early Researcher Award from the Ministry of Colleges and Universities, Dr. Simmons is also an associate editor for the Elsevier Journal “Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology - Part D: Genomics and Proteomics” and the Springer Journal “Archives of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology”. Dr. Simmons received her undergraduate degree from Ryerson University and then completed her master’s degree at Trent University (under the supervision of Chris Metcalfe) which saw her investigating the effects of personal care products on the estrogen receptor, before continuing her doctoral research at Trent University (under the supervision of Dirk Wallschälger and Neil Emery) which focused on the metabolic detoxification of selenium by algae. Dr. Simmons completed two consecutive post-doctoral fellowships at Environment Canada working with Jim Sherry in the Aquatic Contaminants Research Division, where she developed protein profiling and proteomics methods to investigate the health of fish; after which she had two consecutive contracts working on ‘Omics projects with the Ontario Ministry of Environment, Conservation, and Parks.

GRAHAM TAYLOR, university of guelph

Dr. Taylor is a Professor of Engineering at the University of Guelph, where he holds a Canada Research Chair in Machine Learning and serves as Chief Data Officer at the Centre for Biodiversity Genomics. As a Canada CIFAR AI Chair and Faculty Member at the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence, he specializes in machine learning systems for complex environmental data. Taylor advances multimodal machine learning - integrating DNA sequences, images, and sensor networks. Through the BIOSCAN initiative, he has pioneered biodiversity monitoring tools and created BIOSCAN-5M - the world's largest dataset combining DNA barcodes with specimen images - while innovating methods for sequence data and graph-structured relationships relevant for modeling ecological networks and watershed sensor deployments. As a core member of the NSF & NSERC-funded AI for Biodiversity Change Global Climate Center, Taylor develops predictive models for environmental change. His work in graph representation learning is central to WAM's goals of modeling ecological relationships and forecasting phenomena like river channel migration and the growth of harmful algal blooms. His expertise in learning from heterogeneous data supports WAM's mission to integrate data across the land-water continuum. With over 22,000 citations, Taylor brings technical innovation and practical experience in large-scale machine learning systems for environmental monitoring. His work on set-valued and uncertainty-aware prediction methods will support robust ecological monitoring and early warning systems within WAM.

MARGUERITE XENOPOULOS, trent university

Dr. Xenopoulos is a full professor and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Global Change of Freshwater Ecosystems in the Biology Department at Trent University. She’s an ecosystem ecologist whose research expertise centers on understanding how humans and their activities are affecting freshwater ecosystems at both local and global scales. Dr. Xenopoulos has > 115 primary scientific publications and has supervised or co-supervised over 100 graduate and undergraduate theses. Her research program is characterized by an innovative application of interdisciplinary techniques, cross-disciplinary collaborations and partnerships, and adept management of large and diverse research teams.

Dr. Xenopoulos is a productive, well-cited and well-funded scholar whose research impacts academic, policy and public discourse regionally, nationally, and internationally. She is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences, and has received several awards including the William Kaula Award by the American Geophysical Union, a University Faculty Award from Canada’s Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), and an Early Researcher Award from the province of Ontario. She’s also a Sustaining Fellow for the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography and she shared the Zayed Prize for the Environment for her involvement with the United Nation’s Millennium Assessment. Dr. Xenopoulos has served on many committees and evaluation groups. She is currently on the Science Advisory Board of the International Joint Commission, appointed by both Canadian and American Commissioners (2020-2026) to advise them on science priorities for the Laurentian Great Lakes.

 USER NETWORK INCLUDES:

• Joanna Bernhardt, Asst. Prof. (Guelph)

• Rupp Carriveau, Prof. (Windsor)  

• Ryan Lauzon, Fisheries Biol. (SON)

• Vince Palace, Lead Scientist (ELA)

• Rosalind Murray, Asst. Prof. (UTM)     

• Breanna Redford (Chippewas of Nawash Unceded First Nation)

• Ali Saber, Asst. Prof. (Windsor) 

• Paul Frost, Prof. (Trent) 

• Andy Turko, Asst. Prof. (Guelph)

• Amanda Diochon, Associate Prof. (Lakehead)      

• Mathew Wells, Associate Prof. (UTM)

• Bob Hanner, Prof. (Guelph)   

• Ben DeVries, Associate Prof. (Guelph)

• Wanhong Yang, Prof. (Guelph)

• Andrea Kirkwood, Associate Prof. (OTU)

• Julian Aherne, Associate Prof. (Trent)

COLLABORATING ORGANIZATIONS INCLUDE GLFC, RAEON, GWFO IISD-ELA