We are excited – and thankful – that our funding application to the Canadian Foundation for Innovation and the Ministère de l’Économie et de l’Innovation du Québec was successful. This new funding will allow us to deploy a range of instruments in the field to monitor ecohydrological connectivity. More details to come in 2024 when instruments are deployed in the Montérégie region of Québec. In the meantime, you can read a short description of the project motivation and goals below.
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Canadians are increasingly aware of hydrological risks and their socio-economic impacts, given recent episodes of severe flooding and river and lake pollution. Mitigating these risks can be done through natural solutions, such as protecting or restoring riparian buffers. Knowledge gaps remain about the types of riparian buffers showing the best mitigation potential in the face of short- or longer-term climate and land-use changes. The proposed research will establish a Riparian-river Ecohydrological Connectivity Observation Network (RECON) to address these gaps. Different riparian buffers adjacent to forest and agricultural land will be instrumented to assess their ability to enable or impede ecohydrological connectivity (the movement of water, pollutants, and organisms across ecosystems). Soil profilers, sapflow sensors, and water level loggers will provide data on exchanges between soils, vegetation, and rivers, while conductivity loggers and a water quality analyzer will measure downstream pollutants. With data recorded every 15 minutes and used in data-driven models, RECON will be a unique outdoor laboratory specifically designed to monitor connectivity in a mixed-use watershed.
Ecohydrological Systems Laboratory - Laboratoire sur les systèmes écohydrologiques 