International Polar Year (IPY) funding from the Government of Canada was provided for the 2007-8 field seasons and saw a significant increase in the integration and diversity of research activities at CBAWO. Additionally, new ArcticNet funding (2008-11) will provide funds to support continued activities and to integrate results with the larger efforts to prepare integrated regional impact summaries (IRIS) for the Canadian Arctic.

Intensive sampling of river and lake sediment during and following peak spring discharge will continue. The quantity of sediment in the rivers requires manual techniques and we intend to maintain continuous sampling during the peak runoff period and to deploy fluvial sediment traps. This work will quantify sediment delivery in response to snow melt and runoff conditions, and allow detailed evaluation of the hysteresis characteristics of the watersheds and the interaction between channel snow pack storage and sediment yield. Logging suspended sediment load in the river and the lake bottom, along with particle size of sediments during deposition and bottom current velocities will provide a means to closely evaluate sediment delivery processes and the formation of the varve record. The unprecedented detail from these studies will provide the basis for interpretation and comparison of the recent sedimentary records from both lakes.

Monitoring will also continue to quantify the seasonal fluxes of total organic carbon and nitrogen (TOC, and TN) in the watersheds. This work will link biogeochemical fluxes, hydrological processes, aquatic productivity, and the long term paleoenvironmental record. This work substantially builds on the seasonal ecological and biogeochemical work that has been carried out in conjunction with sampling of lake and watershed diatom communities. In addition to snowpack measurements of carbon and nutrients, daily and diurnal sampling strategies will be employed to characterize organic carbon and nitrogen (dissolved and particulate) fluxes from different tributaries in both watersheds. Additionally, we will continue to monitor experimental subcatchments (c. 0.25 km2) on three tributaries containing undisturbed and active ground ice decay, respectively. Measurement of the water, sediment and biogeochemical fluxes from these subcatchments will be expanded with carbon dioxide measurements from key vegetative communities to calculate the seasonal carbon and nutrient balance in these watersheds. At the end of the 2007 season, we installed snow fences in undisturbed subcatchments to attempt to increase the snow water equivalence (SWE) for the 2008 season. Monitoring in 2008 will focus on deciphering the impact of increased SWE on the landscape and will significantly increase our understanding of future landscape-watershed interactions.