New Monitoring Approach Will Help Restore the Health of Freshwater

The health of freshwater ecosystems like lakes and rivers is essential to our existence, but freshwater quality is declining due to human impacts like pollution and land use change. Developing a better understanding of the state of freshwater systems is imperative to shaping the focus of future efforts to restore their health, particularly in the face of climate change.
Trent University Professor and Canada Research Chair in Climate Change and Northern Ecosystems, Dr. Andrew Tanentzap, and co-author Dr. Jérémy Fonvielle, University of Cambridge, highlight a more comprehensive approach to study freshwater health in their new article published in the prestigious journal Science. Their new approach focuses on tracking the fate of individual compounds dissolved in freshwater.
Research suggests that many aspects of freshwater health depend on the composition of dissolved organic matter (DOM) found in water. DOM, a makeup of thousands of individual carbon compounds, mainly originates from the remains of plants and animals surrounding freshwaters, but also comes from organisms found in water, like fish and algae.
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