NWT RESEARCH DATABASE

Regions: Inuvialuit Settlement Region, Gwich'in Settlement Area

Tags: climate change, greenhouse gases, arctic treeline, microbiology

Objective(s): To provide a comprehensive evaluation of carbon capture capacity of the northern tree line migration into the northern regions of Canada. The objective is to identify optimal trees and sites in the northern-migrating tree line that could be used for future large-scale planting for trees by northern communities to help Canada reduce CO2 emissions and fight climate change.

Project Description: This licence has been issued for the scientific research application No. 6013. The overall goal of this project is to provide a comprehensive evaluation of carbon capture capacity of the northern tree line migration into the northern regions of Canada. Specifically, the research group's objective is to identify if soil and plant root associated microbial communities inhabiting areas very close to different tree line trees produce or breakdown greenhouse gases (i.e. methane, carbon dioxide, N2O) as well as what types and how much of these gases are produced in locations close to and from tree line trees and shrubs inhabiting the treeline around Inuvik. The objective of this initial project is to identify optimal trees and sites in the northern-migrating tree line that could be used for future large-scale planting for trees by northern communities to help Canada reduce CO2 emissions and fight climate change. Please see the attached NSERC Alliance Grant fund that is supporting this research activity. This project will require multidisciplinary expertise including northern traditional knowledge and cooperation between the scientific members and the Inuvik community to select optimal field site locations and identify tree types, provide logistical support, and assistance in the field research activities. For this, the team will collect small soil cores from locations close to and far from tree growth. A soil corer will be used to collect ~ 1 kg soil samples and stored in coolers. The samples will be then be frozen and shipped back to McGill University for further microbial analyses (DNA extraction, chemical analysis, etc) focused on determining the major microorganisms involved in metabolisms of these GHGs. Additionally, CO2, CH4 and N2O soil gas fluxes will be measured on site in the soils of different trees that are growing on the tree line around the Inuvik treeline areas, which will hopefully identify which treeline trees fix the greatest amounts of CO2. The team would like to hire from the Inuvik community a guide to help recon the area by truck and select sites for sampling. In addition, the team would also like to have local high school students interested in this research to join the team in the field and help perform the sampling and on site GHG analyses for this field trip and the follow-up field trips planned for 2025 and 2026. This hopefully will have strong benefits to both the research being conducted as well as providing training and knowledge to young students. Attached you'll find the proposal, and under "Whyte: Measurement in situ field GHG soil fluxes and microbial ecosystem analyses" on page 6 it describes these activities in detail. Currently, we've sent our emails and are trying to get in contact with the Inuvik local communities, but during this trip we would like to take at least one of the days to meet with the Inuvik community and talk about what our research is and show them what we do and how we do it. Hopefully, next year when we come back we can show them all the results we collected and what it means. We can create a poster to hang in the library. If there would be interest, if anyone would like to join us and see how we do our science we can bring extra supplies so they can take some samples too. Additionally, we will submit reports to the community in the next year's application about any results collected from this year. Lastly, as a broader communication plan, the whole team on this grant would like to visit with the community in 2025 and have an open discussion about their thoughts and opinions on this type of research activity. The fieldwork for this study will be conducted from: September 07 - October 12, 2024