Articles from:March 2017

• Brock hosting milestone PALS conference

  Saturday, March 25, 2017 | By Amanda Smits

  Published on March 10 2017

  From The Brock News

  When the Ontario-Quebec Paleolimnological Symposium (PALS) marks its 10th anniversary in May, it will do so on Brock’s campus.

  The conference, focused on the fields of limnology and paleolimnology, is being hosted by the University May 24 to 26.

  Organized by a group of Brock WEL (Water and Environmental Lab) graduate students, the event provides undergraduate and graduate students, as well as postdoctoral fellows, the opportunity to present their research related to lakes and other bodies of inland water.

  “This year marks the 10th anniversary of the symposium, an event that was literally born out of notes on the back of a napkin,” said WEL Co-Director Michael Pisaric.

  “The PALS symposium continues to grow and flourish each year, as does the relevance of the science that will be explored and discussed at PALS 2017. From acid rain to the impacts of the oil sands, paleolimnology provides a powerful tool to monitor and disentangle many of the most complex environmental issues affecting the world today.”

  PALS is annually attended by students and researchers from across Ontario and Quebec. This year, Brock has also invited researchers from neighbouring institutions in New York state.

  The conference will feature three keynote speakers: Elizabeth Thomas (University of Buffalo), Fredric Bouchard (Université Laval) and Francine McCarthy (Brock University).

  “As graduate students, we are excited to have the opportunity to welcome fellow academics to Brock and to showcase current research in the paleolimnology field,” said Zachary Harmer, WEL graduate student and PALS organizer.

  In addition to networking with researchers and connecting with potential mentors, students participating in the conference will have the chance to present their research through oral or poster presentations.

  WEL Co-Director Kevin Turner called it an honour for Brock to be hosting the milestone event that encourages further research and discussion in a critical field.

  “Paleolimnological analyses of lake sediment provides vast insight of past lake and landscape environmental conditions in areas where no direct measurements have been made,” he said.

  “It is important for researchers to continue exploring this issue.”

  For more information on the symposium or to register online, visit www.pals2017.com.

  From The Brock News

• Brock researcher finds climate change further endangering Canadian bison

  Saturday, March 25, 2017 | By Amanda Smits

  Published on March 07 2017

  From The Brock News

  Climate change is making things worse for Canada’s largest land-dwelling mammal, which is already on the country’s threatened species list, a research team has found.

  More precipitation is forcing the wood bison of Northwest Territories into areas that pose dangers for them, says Brock University geographer and research team member Michael Pisaric.

  For decades, the wood bison population has been living in the Mackenzie Bison Sanctuary on the western shore of Great Slave Lake in N.W.T. The iconic animal lives off of grass-like plants called sedges, which are common along lake shorelines in the region.

  But these sedge meadows are increasingly becoming flooded as the lakes expand “and the bison’s preferred habitat declines,” explains Pisaric, professor in Brock’s Department of Geography and Tourism Studies.

  Pisaric was part of a research team led by the University of Ottawa that included the government of N.W.T. and five partner universities, including Brock. They studied satellite images from the 1980s to present and, before that, sediment cores taken from a number of lakes in the area to track lake surface changes over the last few centuries.

  The team’s study, “Broad-scale lake expansion and flooding inundates essential wood bison habitat,” was published in the Feb. 23 edition of the journal Nature Communications.

  “We found out from satellite data that the total area of the Mackenzie Bison Sanctuary covered in water was about five per cent in the 1980s,” explains Pisaric. “This has increased to over 11 per cent of the land area now.”

  While the exact causes of the lake expansion remain uncertain, Pisaric says warmer temperatures bring more precipitation and some permafrost thawing.

  Because the bison sanctuary land is so flat, even slight changes in precipitation and flow causes water bodies to grow. He says some lakes in the area have expanded “hundreds of times in size” and are the largest they’ve been in at least 200 years.

  “Surveys of the bison population at the same time indicate that, as the lakes have expanded, the Mackenzie herd appears to have abandoned the former core of its range within the protected area of the sanctuary as habitat becomes inundated,” says Pisaric.

  The wood bison are moving toward a busy highway that connects Edmonton with Yellowknife. The road is often travelled by large trucks going back and forth from the North’s diamond mines.

  “Incidents of collisions have increased,” says Pisaric. “It’s especially dangerous in the fall, when daylight begins to decrease again and there’s no snow cover yet; drivers don’t see the bison until they’re right on top of them.”

  The wood bison, found in Alberta, Manitoba, British Columbia, Yukon, and southwestern N.W.T, is a subspecies of the American bison listed as “threatened” under Canada’s Species at Risk Act.

  “Disease, cross-breeding with plains bison and habitat loss through human development, agriculture, forestry and petroleum resource development are the main threats faced by Wood Bison,” says the Species at Risk Public Registry.

  Pisaric explains that the wood bison living in Mackenzie Bison Sanctuary are “genetically pure,” taken to the sanctuary from a remote location in Wood Buffalo National Park during the 1960s.

  “Most of the wood bison that we have in Canada are a cross between the plains bison and wood bison, so they’re not genetically pure,” he says.

  Story from The Brock News