Seeking Solutions through S&T

To meet this challenge, Environment Canada developed the Canadian Aquatic Biomonitoring Network (CABIN), using benthic invertebrates to better understand the health of freshwater ecosystems. These bottom-dwelling animals without backbones live in all freshwater ecosystems, can be collected almost everywhere, and are a key part of the food web.

Analyzing the health of benthic invertebrates reveals the overall health of the ecosystem and helps identify key stressors and cumulative impacts that may be difficult to capture with routine chemical sampling. Other stressors that may be captured by biological monitoring include exotic species, habitat degradation in the water body or surrounding land, and fluctuations in water quantity. Studying these biological organisms is an essential component of effective water quality monitoring.

To standardize biological monitoring and assessment across the country, Environment Canada researchers designed CABIN using a network-of-networks approach to achieve consistent and comparable reporting on freshwater quality and aquatic ecosystem conditions in Canada. The inter-agency collaborative approach engages municipalities, provinces, students and members of the public, with over 500 CABIN users sharing comparable data and reporting on water quality. The program is maintained by Environment Canada to support collection, assessment, reporting and distribution of biological monitoring information. CABIN allows partners to determine the extent of water quality impairment by using their observations to make a formalized scientific assessment using nationally comparable standards.

CABIN is an evolving program based on the latest scientific research that translates national and international biomonitoring methods into a user-friendly protocol to be used by various types of organizations across the country. Environment Canada led development of the program, first through sampling benthic invertebrates in the Great Lakes and then in the Fraser River Basin in British Columbia. Through this process, Environment Canada researchers developed a national standardized sampling protocol for rivers and streams.

The Department has since developed a training program to broaden the network and ensure that all groups who are part of it can collect comparable data. The online database of over 9,000 records allows scientists to establish baseline conditions and determine, now and into the future, if sites of concern within freshwaters have diverged from these established baselines.

Impact On Decision Making

In several Canadian National Parks, CABIN is being applied as one of several measures to assess freshwater ecosystem health as part of Parks Canada’s ecological integrity monitoring program. The purpose is to evaluate ecological integrity, conditions and trends, facilitating early detection of impairment and rapid management responses. CABIN monitoring has been ongoing in some parks since 2006 by Parks Canada staff. In other parks such as Kouchibouguac National Park, New Brunswick, CABIN monitoring has been carried out in partnership with the local community catchment group, Les Amis de la Kouchibouguacis. Permanent sites have been established in some of the major watercourses running through the National Parks and are revisited for CABIN sampling annually.

Across the country, many jurisdictions have been conducting stream biomonitoring in various forms since the early 1960s. Typically, these initiatives have been project-based and used a variety of sampling and analytical protocols, creating results that were not easily comparable, project to project or region to region. Recently, within British Columbia, a standardized biomonitoring program based on the CABIN approach was established by the provincial government.

This broader program allows scientists to address larger scale questions about stream condition and is based on the pooled resources of all its partners (e.g., Environment Canada, Parks Canada and British Columbia Ministry of Environment). The partnership allows a much more robust program than would have been feasible as a strictly single-agency program and thus supports assessment of stream condition(s) in a defensible, cost effective manner, serving as a primary example of the success of CABIN’s network of networks approach. 

A critical step in the development of guidelines for protecting the health of river ecosystems is an understanding of the interaction between river biota and flow variables. However, this relationship is often poorly understood, and, as a consequence, over-simplistic hydrology-based guidelines for river management have been adopted without establishment of clear indicators of their success or failure. CABIN has played a role in addressing this problem. Researchers used 2,700 biological samples from the CABIN database to develop the nationally applicableCanadian Ecological Flow Index, a new tool to support hydroecological management guidelines based on a more thorough understanding of both the hydrology and ecology of a river. This tool is currently being tested for future incorporation as a metric on the CABIN website.

Benefits to Canadians

CABIN provides a cost-effective method to develop and share credible baseline data about an ecosystem. The network benefits agencies from all levels of government, industry and academia who conduct water quality assessments. Several volunteer community watershed groups are also part of the network, and have been able to turn backyard stream assessments into credible scientific assessments.

CABIN benefits the Canadian public by providing a means of collaboration and coordination on an area of critical importance to Canada’s environment. The network increases access to a growing wealth of data on the health of our aquatic ecosystems. Metadata are available to the public and detailed data are available to network members.

CABIN training and certification:

In partnership with the Canadian Rivers Institute at the University of New Brunswick, Environment Canada has developed an online training program of nationally standardized protocols for aquatic biomonitoring in streams and rivers. The full program consists of online learning modules followed by a field certification workshop.

The training program is designed to accommodate a range of participants based on how CABIN will be applied. Once certified, CABIN partners gain access to a suite of web-accessible tools and resources such as a national database of biological reference condition information, a data management system, analytical software and reporting tools.

For more information:

Municipalities, community groups, and others who wish to contribute to this network of monitoring should contact Environment Canada’s CABIN team.

For detailed information about the certification program, fees, and schedule, please visit the Canadian Rivers Institute training website.