In Canada, monitoring of most lakes is under the jurisdiction of provinces and territories and no governmental national assessment exists. Given the vastly different stressors, lake types, climate and number of lakes in within their borders, the approaches to monitoring are very different in each province or territory such that a national portrait would be very difficult to obtain even if all datasets were available. It is within this context that the NSERC Canadian LakePulse network, a partnership between academia and government, was developed. Its aims are to: 1) provide a national assessment of Canadian lakes, 2) advance limnological science and 3) train students.
Results/Conclusions
Over the last three summers we have sampled 664 lakes across southern Canada and as far North as the Arctic Ocean for over 100 variables. We will present the Network, the lake selection approach, the methods for the field campaigns and our efforts to return the information to the public and policy makers. Finally, we will also share some initial results from our first field campaign that took place in Eastern Canada specifically regarding organic contaminants found in lakes and alteration of lake communities over the last 200 years using paleolimnological approaches and contemporary metagenomics approach and how those are related to current lands use in the lake watersheds.