Coastal pan-Canadian biodiversity mapping using eDNA

Canada’s marine ecosystems are biologically rich and provide essential goods and services to about seven million people living along the longest coastline in the world. Facing significant challenges to conciliate economic development, human well-being, social equity and ecological stability, Canada developed an ambitious “Blue Economy” framework, in which this project falls. In the face of biodiversity loss worldwide, monitoring marine biodiversity has been identified as a priority by the government of Canada to meet its objectives to protect 25% of its oceans by 2050. Compared to traditional biomonitoring approaches, environmental DNA is non-intrusive, have a high rate of species detection and is accessible to non-specialists. Taking advantage of this new technology, our project aims to provide a framework for a pan-Canadian database of coastal marine biodiversity, ranging from microbes to marine mammals. By analyzing the dataset collected during the Canada C3 expedition, we will identify shifts in biodiversity along Canada’s coastline across multiple taxonomic categories. We hypothesize that latitudinal trends of biodiversity along the Canada’s coastline will be different across taxonomic groups and does not always follow the global scale paradigm of a poleward decrease of biodiversity.

Faculty Supervisor:

Connie Lovejoy;Kristi Miller-Saunders;Brian Hunt

Student:

Partner:

SOI Foundation

Discipline:

Life Sciences

Sector:

Sustainability & the Environment; Education; Environmental Science and Technology

University:

Université Laval

Program: