It was working in the Arctic when Dr. Danielle Nowosad discovered something life-changing: the confidence to ask and answer her own scientific questions. “Working in Churchill was life-changing for me and I wanted to move further north with research,” she reflects.
Driven by her newfound passion for research in polar freshwater environments, she joined Drs. Sarah Adamowicz and Ian Hogg at the University of Guelph for doctoral studies. There she explored a critical question: how does a warming Arctic affect freshwater biodiversity, particularly black flies that can transmit pathogens between important wildlife like caribou and musk ox?
This question is of pressing concern, as the Arctic warms three to four times the global average, changing the insect populations that threaten native wildlife. These changes disrupt the traditional food systems of Nunavummiut (people who live in Nunavut). They traditionally harvest food from the sea and land.
To answer this question, Nowosad used DNA barcoding—a technique that quickly and accurately identifies species. “DNA barcoding helped me create a genomic baseline of invertebrate species [including black flies] in freshwater systems around Cambridge Bay, Nunavut,” she explains. The barcoding data allowed Nowosad to capture a detailed snapshot of the ecosystem at a specific moment in time. Using this snapshot as a reference point, researchers can now track black fly populations and their diversity as the Arctic warms.
The results are concerning. “Species richness of black flies has increased,” says Nowosad, “and the number of species capable of acting as vectors [that spread pathogens] has very likely increased in Nunavut since the last survey in 2010-11.” This shift in black fly population threatens the health of animals essential for subsistence harvests and cultural practices, for whom traditional harvesting, Nowosad highlights, is “highly important to nutrition and practice of culture.”
Now a postdoc at the University of Calgary, Nowosad studies these ecological relationships to help maintain wildlife health so that Inuit communities can continue traditional harvesting. She also advocates for communicating the research findings to the communities, who she notes “need to know research activities occurring in their backyards as it directly impacts them.”
Photo Credit: Brodie Larocque and Elise Imbeau, Polar Knowledge Canada
