The STREAM project brings together academic researchers from the University of Guelph, researchers from the non-governmental organizations Living Lakes Canada and WWF Canada, and researchers from the federal government at Environment and Climate Change Canada, for community-based biological monitoring of Canadian streams.  The workhorse of freshwater biological monitoring are stream-bottom macroinvertebrates because they can be differentially sensitive to water pollution.  This work is important for assessing the regional impacts of local disturbances as well as for assessing the longer term impacts of climate change on Canadian freshwater systems.  In this project, we scale-up macroinvertebrate detections using DNA metabarcoding (figure below).  Using this methodology in Canadian streams, wetlands, and lakes has also allowed us to examine how communities shift across environmental gradients and assess community stability. 

Together with the Great Lakes Forestry Centre in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, Canada the Ecobiomics project uses metagenomics-based methods for ecosystem biomonitoring.  The mandate at Natural Resources Canada and the Canadian Forestry Service, is to assess the sustainability of forest management practices.  In a recent paper, we assessed the recovery of soil communities following natural wildfire and described the implications for forest management.  For the first time, we simultaneously tracked three major components of the soil ecosystem (bacteria, fungi, and arthropods) to assess community assembly processes and recovery across an 85-year chronosequence.  Then we simulated the truncation of stand development stages predicted to occur with the increasing frequency of wildfires due to climate change.  We found that each stand development stage harboured a unique profile of soil bacteria, fungi, and arthropods.  We suggested that forest managers should strive to maintain a diversity of managed stand development stages to maintain the full suite of soil biodiversity and the functions they perform at a landscape scale.  We also detected the presence of the early-diverging fungal group, the Archaeorhizomycetes, and they were found to be biological indicators of establishment and mature soils.  Do these fungi require fire to complete their life cycle or are they just opportunistic?  There is so much more to learn about this widespread but enigmatic group of fungi.