Assessing mining impacts on lakes using sediment environmental DNA

Funding period: 2024-2028
Lead: Sean Langley
Total GRDI funding: $175,000

The objective of the project is to determine whether sediment eDNA might serve as a suitable proxy for determining current and historical impacts of mining activity on aquatic ecosystems by: successfully extracting intact DNA (microbial, invertebrate, fish) from older sediment layers and using it to determine variations in community composition over time for both a mine-exposed lake and a suitable reference lake; correlating changes in community composition to detectable changes in sediment geochemistry/mineralogy and documented historical mining releases; and comparing the quality of the findings to those obtained by traditional monitoring programs.