A new collaboration between a McMaster professor and a Canadian research institute will explore how changing climates have impacted ecosystems of the past, with the goal of creating predictive models for the future.
Hendrik Poinar, a professor of Anthropology and Biochemistry at McMaster, is co-leading the project alongside Tyler Murchie and Eric Peterson from the Hakai Institute – an ecological research centre based in British Columbia and part of the Tula Foundation.
Supported by a combined $2.3 million investment from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and the Tula Foundation, the project will harness ancient DNA to better understand how landscapes have recovered from previous climactic shifts and predict how current ecosystems will respond to a changing climate.
Home to the largest permafrost reserves in the world, Canada holds the answers to some of our most pressing questions about climate change, says Poinar, director of the McMaster Ancient DNA Centre and the Michael G. DeGroote Chair in Genetic Anthropology.
“Canada is fortunate to have vast and deep archives of biospheric data preserved in perennially frozen permafrost deposits and coastal marine sediments,” he explains.
“These records tell us how plants, animals, fungi and microbes have responded to past ecological transformations. They are key to preparing for and mitigating the inevitable changes in store for Canadian ecosystems, which are continually impacted by a rapidly shifting climate.”
The team will tap into two sources of sedimentary deposits that go back nearly one million years. Permafrost work will take place primarily at McMaster and marine sediment core work will take place primarily at the Hakai Institute in B.C.
The grant opens up exciting new possibilities, allowing Hakai and McMaster to unlock high-resolution ‘deep time’ biodiversity records, says Murchie, a palaeogenomics researcher at the Hakai Institute.
“By analyzing these rich biomolecular archives, we’ll reveal how ecosystems responded to major environmental changes over hundreds of thousands of years – providing critical context for the changes we see today, and improving the tools needed to recover and interpret ancient environmental DNA from diverse burial records,” he says.
The grant will also help establish the Canadian Ancient DNA (Can-aDNA) Network, which will standardize and cross-validate methods and data nationwide, and train the next generation of Canadian palaeogenomics researchers — strengthening Canada’s leadership in the field.
To help with the project, the team will recruit graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, giving trainees a unique opportunity to learn cutting-edge palaeogenomic methods and analyses from some of the top ancient DNA practitioners in the country.
“Trainees will play an important role in every stage of the project — from field work and sample collection to data analysis, education and outreach in communities across the country,” says Poinar.
“We’re excited to collaborate with our partners at the Hakai Institute and help ensure future leaders in the field have the skills they need to tackle complex climate questions.”