Regions: South Slave Region
Tags: climate change, paleohydrology, historical data, flooding, resource management, ecological change, ice jams, nutrient levels, sediment core sampling, drought
| Principal Investigator: | Wolfe, Brent BBW (10) |
| Licence Number: | 13424 |
| Organization: | Wilfrid Laurier University |
| Licensed Year(s): |
2007
2006
2005
2004
2003
2002
|
| Issued: | May 05, 2003 |
| Project Team: | Dr. Roland |
Objective(s): This project will formulate a comprehensive history of the frequency and magnitude of floods and droughts and corresponding ecological responses in the Mackenzie Basin deltas over the past 1000 years. These deltas have broad ecological and cultural significance and are ecosystems highly sensitive to prevailing climatic and hydrological conditions. Results from this study will provide an essential database for refining and validating models of climate change and impact on delta hydrology. This information is vital to allow governments, First Nations communities, and industry to develop water resource management adaptation strategies to minimize the impact of future change. Reconstruction of past hydrology and ecology will be generated from physical, biological and geochemical information preserved in lake sediment cores obtained from small, restricted- and closed-drainage lakes within the deltas. These lakes are targeted because the sediments will provide temporal resolution on the order of a decade or finer and they are the systems most affected by alteration in ice-jam induced floods, the primary mechanism that maintains lake water and nutrient balance.
