Use of traditional environmental knowledge to assess the impact of climate change on subsistence fishing in the James Bay Region of Northern Ontario, Canada.

Introduction: In Canada, unique food security challenges are being faced by Aboriginal people living in remote-northern communities due to the impacts of climate change on subsistence harvesting. This study used traditional environmental knowledge (TEK) to investigate whether there was a temporal relationship between extreme climatic events in the summer of 2005, and fish die-offs in the Albany River, northern Ontario, Canada. Also, TEK was utilized to examine a potential shift in subsistence fish species distribution due to climate change.

Construction costs, payback times, and the leaf economics of carnivorous plants.

Understanding how different plant species and functional types "invest" carbon and nutrients is a major goal of plant ecologists. Two measures of such investments are "construction costs" (carbon needed to produce each gram of tissue) and associated "payback times" for photosynthesis to recover construction costs. These measurements integrate among traits used to assess leaf-trait scaling relationships.

The pitcher plant Sarracenia purpurea can directly acquire organic nitrogen and short-circuit the inorganic nitrogen cycle.

Background: Despite the large stocks of organic nitrogen in soil, nitrogen availability limits plant growth in many terrestrial ecosystems because most plants take up only inorganic nitrogen, not organic nitrogen. Although some vascular plants can assimilate organic nitrogen directly, only recently has organic nitrogen been found to contribute significantly to the nutrient budget of any plant. Carnivorous plants grow in extremely nutrient-poor environments and carnivory has evolved in these plants as an alternative pathway for obtaining nutrients.

Wetland soil and vegetation bismuth content following experimental deposition of bismuth pellets.

Bismuth pellets have been approved as a non-toxic alternative to lead pellets in Canada since 1997 but, to our knowledge, there is little literature for soil and vegetation bismuth content in areas of bismuth pellet deposition. The present study addresses this shortcoming by measuring wetland soil and vegetation bismuth content following experimental deposition of bismuth pellets under ambient and experimentally increased acidic deposition conditions. We manipulated 24 plots in a fully factorial design (bismuth shot x soil acidification) in a south-eastern Ontario freshwater wetland during 1999-2003.