The STREAM (Sequencing the Rivers for Environmental Assessment and Monitoring) project involves citizen scientists and dozens of members of Indigenous communities in collecting samples for data to monitor freshwater health.

“These communities are well aware of the potential issues affecting their environment and they want timely and comprehensive access to biodiversity information, especially for freshwater biomonitoring. We can provide that using cutting-edge metabarcoding techniques developed at U of G,” says project lead Prof. Mehrdad Hajibabaei, Department of Integrative Biology, and a member of the University’s Centre for Biodiversity Genomics.

Metabarcoding technology developed by his lab allows scientists to analyze DNA and identify numerous organisms at once.

“We can turn around results to a community group within two months using metabarcoding,” which is several times faster than methods that use microscopes to analyze single organisms, says Chloe Robinson, a post-doctoral researcher who is also STREAM’s project coordinator.

Many of Canada’s important but little-researched waterways are in lands where Indigenous peoples have lived for generations, Hajibabaei says.

“We have partnered with Indigenous communities and seek their perspective to understand which sites are most important. So these partnerships have been invaluable to helping us study the health of freshwater ecosystems.”

“Without these groups, it would be impossible to access remote sites to do this research. We hope to create new partnerships with more Indigenous communities so we can broaden this research.”

Data from the catalogued samples are shared with other STREAM project partners, including World Wildlife Fund-Canada, Living Lakes Canada, and Environment and Climate Change Canada.

For more information, please go to stream-dna.com.

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It will build on the University of Guelph’s expertise in the environment and sustainability by bringing together researchers from diverse fields.

“GIER includes researchers from all seven colleges at the University,” says Prof. Madhur Anand, the institute’s inaugural executive director. “Not many places in the world aim to contain such a breadth of environmental inquiry under one umbrella.”

More than 200 faculty members across campus study aspects of the environment. With annual funding of more than $400,000, GIER will stimulate collaborations and raise the profile of environmental research through conferences and other gatherings.

“As pressures on the global environment intensify, we must intensify our response as world leaders in many areas of research related to the environment,” says Charlotte Yates, provost and vice-president (academic).

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