Peters Award

Madison Bell

University of Ottawa

A continental scale spatial investigation of sediment organic matter for ecological classification

Bell, M.A.*, Overy, D.P., and Blais, J.M.

Lake sediments are a natural record of biodiversity because they are archives of natural organic materials derived from plants, animals, microbes, and geological processes in the catchment. We used surface sediments from 61 lakes to examine the composition of natural organic matter across northern Canada. Samples were extracted using a metabolomics-derived untargeted method and analyzed using high resolution mass spectrometry to determine their sedimentary molecular composition. Machine learning clustering analyses were then to define regional lake districts, and to overlay current spatial classification systems (i.e. ecozones) onto the distribution of sediment organic matter. Our work represents a first-of-its-kind analysis of the composition of organic carbon molecules in lake sediments across a large geographical extent using a new sedimentomics technique. This presentation highlights the power of sedimentomics to define regional and ecological boundaries, to investigate climate change, and it can be integrated with other research fields like metagenomics to build more informative models on carbon cycling.

Matthew Duda

Queen's University

Using paleolimnology to track long-term changes in seabird populations

Matthew Duda, Gregory Robertson, Joeline Lim, Jennifer Kissinger, David Eickmeyer, Christopher Grooms, Linda Kimpe, William Montevecchi, Neal Michelutti, Jules Blais, and John Smol

Globally, seabird numbers are in decline. This problem is exacerbated by sparse surveying, which results in the inability to consider natural variability when developing conservation methods. Here, we address the lack of surveying by using a wide spectrum of landscape-scale paleoenvironmental approaches to study the long-term trends of the world’s current largest colony of Leach’s Storm-petrel (Hydrobates leucorhous). By reconstructing the last ~1,700 years of storm-petrel dynamics, our data corroborate the two available surveys from 1984 and 2013 that indicate the colony is decline. However, we also establish that the inaugural 1984 census was actually the colony’s highest size in the 1700-year sediment record. Notably, we recorded an earlier population peak ca. 500 CE, which grew and declined in the absence of modern anthropogenic impacts. Our data confirm that this important colony is in decline, but also establish that natural variability must be considered when developing management strategies.