Water is one of Canada’s greatest natural resources: it is not only essential for life but it is also central to the Canadian way of life.
Goal:Our goal is to change the way we monitor water quality in our watersheds. Current tools to assess water quality are nearly a century old and have not adopted newer, faster molecular monitoring methods. The new science of metagenomics - an approach that looks at all genomes from an environment - is being used to discover novel indicators of water pollution as well as to identify sources of pollution. We are creating “water profiles” that provide a picture of watershed health, and are working towards developing tools to support proactive rather than reactive protection of our water
sources.
Check out our new
infographic on this project.