Observatoire global du Saint-Laurent (OGSL)

The St. Lawrence is a vast and complex socio-ecological system providing a wealth of services that sustain numerous economic sectors. This ecosystem is subject to significant human pressures that overlap and potentially interact with climate-driven environmental changes. Our objective in this paper was to systematically characterize the distribution and intensity of drivers of environmental change (hereafter, drivers) in the St. Lawrence System. We gathered data-based indicators for 22 coastal, climate, fisheries, and marine traffic drivers through collaborations, existing environmental initiatives and open data portals. We show that few areas of the St. Lawrence are free of cumulative exposure. The Estuary, Anticosti Gyre, and coastal areas are particularly exposed, especially in the vicinity of urban centers. We identified six distinct clusters with similar suites of co-occurring drivers and show that certain driver combinations are inherent to different regions of the St. Lawrence and that coastal areas are exposed to all driver types. Of particular concern are two clusters capturing most exposure hotspots and that show the convergence of contrasting cumulative exposure profiles at the head of the Laurentian Channel. Sharing knowledge of drivers emerged as a priority to facilitate future environmental assessment efforts. We thus launch eDrivers, an open knowledge platform gathering experts committed to structuring, standardizing and sharing knowledge on drivers of environmental change in support of holistic science and management. eDrivers was built on a series of guiding principles upholding existing data management and open science standards. We therefore expect it to evolve Beauchesne et al.

Ocean observation is fundamental to Canada’s ocean science community. The federal government, academia, small businesses, not-for-profit organizations, and other research partners, collect and synthesize physical, chemical and biological observations for research purposes, to model ocean changes, to support resource management decision-making, and to establish baseline data for long-term monitoring. Aside from building comprehensive ocean observatories (Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) et al. 2010), there is no easy mechanism to integrate the large amounts of data from the various sources or to explore interrelationships among variables, and no coordination and collaboration mechanism for the ocean community as a whole to generate an efficient system (Ocean Science and Technology Partnership (OSTP), for Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) 2011). Consequently, we observe fragmented and isolated data that is only discoverable by a limited range of end users. Canada’s ocean science community (Wallace et al. 2014), led and supported by Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO), is developing a Canadian Integrated Ocean Observation System (CIOOS) that brings together and leverages existing Canadian and international ocean observation data into a federated data system. This system (Wilson et al. 2016) will improve coordination and collaboration among diverse data producers, improve access to information for decision making, and enable discovery and access to data to support a wide variety of applied and theoretical research efforts to better understand, monitor, and manage activities in Canada’s oceans. Canada is implementing a CIOOS test-phase, which will eventually lead to the development of a robust and integrated observing system, improving connections between end users and providers of ocean observations. The improved coordination of regional and national efforts within CIOOS will contribute to global ocean observing, maximizing the overall benefit of integrated observing.

Large changes in marine CO2 chemistry manifest in areas with weakly-buffered seawater where ocean acidification (OA) acts in concert with natural CO2 additions. These settings can exhibit periods of extreme OA in the form of multiple co-occurring stressors, including calcite undersaturation and low pH. Such conditions were observed in the northern Strait of Georgia, on the northeast Pacific coast, where extreme OA spanned a 3-year period. Here, we utilized an 8-year, highly-resolved record of seawater CO2 partial pressure and total dissolved inorganic carbon to decompose the drivers of this extreme OA. We find that variability in storm season intensity shaped the extent of conservative mixing and biogeochemical drivers such that manifests of extreme OA arise in this setting. Extreme OA manifested during years with weak storm seasons due to direct and indirect biogeochemical factors and the reduced impact of conservative mixing. This sensitivity to the storm season intensity highlights how vulnerable the northern Strait of Georgia is to subtle changes in environmental forcing and provides some predictive capacity for OA conditions over the coming year. These results illustrate that OA is not a “slow burn” process within weakly-buffered settings, but rather invokes periods of intensification with poorly understood biological implications.