Extreme water level along the marine coastline is a result of a combination of storm surge, tides, and ocean waves. Future projections of climate change in the marine environment indicate that rising sea level and declining sea ice will cause changes in extreme water levels, which will impact Canada's coastlines and the infrastructure in these areas. Understanding these changes is essential for developing adaptation strategies that can minimize the harmful effects that may result.CAN-EWLAT is a science-based planning tool for climate change adaptation of coastal infrastructure related to future water-level extremes and changes in wave climate. The tool includes two main components: 1) vertical allowance and 2) wave climate. CAN-EWLAT was developed primarily for DFO Small Craft Harbours (SCH) locations, but it should prove useful for coastal planners dealing with infrastructure along Canada’s ocean coastlines.Cite this data as: Greenan B. Canadian Extreme Water Level Adaptation Tool (CAN-EWLAT) Published June 2022. Oceans Ecosystems Science Division, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Dartmouth, N.S.

The database of local governments climate change plans provides information on status of development of climate change adaptation plans.

PURPOSE:Understanding and predicting species range shifts is crucial for conservation amid global warming. This study analyzes life-history traits of four seal species (ringed (Pusa hispida Schreber, 1775), bearded (Erignathus barbatus Pallas, 1811), harp (Pagophilus groenlandicus Erxleben, 1777), and harbour (Phoca vitulina Linnaeus, 1758) seals) in the Canadian Arctic using data from Inuit subsistence harvests. Bearded seals are largest, followed by harp seals, harbour seals, and ringed seals. Seasonal blubber depth patterns show minimal variation in bearded seals, whereas harbour and ringed seals accumulate fat in open-water seasons and use it during ice-covered seasons. Endemic Arctic seals (ringed and bearded) exhibit greater longevity and determinate body growth, reaching maximum size by 5 years, while harbour and harp seals grow indeterminately, physically maturing around 10-15 years. Age of maturation varies, with ringed and harbour seals being more sensitive to environmental fluctuations. Most bearded seals reproduce successfully each year, while ringed seals exhibit more variability in their annual reproductive success. Analysis of isoprenoid lipids in liver tissue indicates that ringed and bearded seals rely on ice-algal production, whereas harp and harbour seals depend on open-water phytoplankton production. Bearded seals appear more specialized and potentially face less competition, while harp seals may adapt better to changing habitats. Despite expected range shifts to higher latitudes, all species exhibit tradeoffs, complicating predictions for the evolving Arctic environment. DESCRIPTION:This dataset contains the data reported in Steven H. Ferguson, Jeff W. Higdon, Brent G. Young, Stephen D. Petersen, Cody G. Carlyle, Ellen V. Lea, Caroline C. Sauvé, Doreen Kohlbach, Aaron T. Fisk, Gregory W. Thiemann, Katie R. N. Florko, Derek C. G. Muir, Charmain D. Hamilton, Magali Houde, Enooyaq Sudlovenick, and David J. Yurkowski. 2024. A comparative analysis of life-history features and adaptive strategies of Arctic and subarctic seal species - who will win the climate change challenge? Canadian Journal of Zoology 2024-0093.R1The data set includes species, location, harvest date, sex, age, standard length, girth, fat depth, teste size, parity status, pregnancy status, corpora lutea (n), corpus albicans (n), follicles (n). This dataset includes raw, unfiltered, and unprocessed historical data provided by harvesters that have not been screened for outliers. Individual users should screen the data for their specific use.Cite these data as:Steven H. Ferguson, Jeff W. Higdon, Brent G. Young, Stephen D. Petersen, Cody G. Carlyle, Ellen V. Lea, Caroline C. Sauvé, Doreen Kohlbach, Aaron T. Fisk, Gregory W. Thiemann, Katie R. N. Florko, Derek C. G. Muir, Charmain D. Hamilton, Magali Houde, Enooyaq Sudlovenick, and David J. Yurkowski. 2024. Arctic and Aquatic Research Division, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Winnipeg, MB. https://open.canada.ca/data/en/dataset/ea9ff038-8b16-11ef-8cce-55cc7f028297

This project mapped hazard risks for Yukon communities. Hazard maps serve as an adaptation planning tool that can support responsible, forward-looking decisions related to climate change impacts on communities.

The “Terrestrial Ecozones of Canada” dataset provides representations of ecozones. An ecozone is the top level of the four levels of ecosystems that the National Ecological Framework for Canada defines. The framework divides Canada into 15 terrestrial ecozones that define its ecological mosaic on a sub-continental scale. Ecozones represent an area of the earth’s surface as large and very generalized ecological units. These units are characterized by interactive and adjusting abiotic and biotic factors.

The dataset consists of maps detailing the boundaries of the designatable units for conservation considerations as defined by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC) for species of Pacific Salmon in British Columbia and the Yukon. Designatable units represent geographical areas that support groups of individuals with a unique genetic heritage makes them discrete and evolutionarily significant units of the taxonomic species, where “significant” means that the unit is important to the evolutionary legacy of the species as a whole and if lost is unlikely to be replaced through natural dispersion.

Data describing clean growth and climate change projects that have received federal funding since 2015 that feeds into the Climate Action Map. The data include projects that meet Mitigation, Adaptation and Clean Technology objectives. The data include project names and descriptions, funding information, locations, and recipients.

The RVI/CVI database is derived from the CanEcumene 3.0 GDB (Eddy, et. al. 2023) using a selection of socio-economic variables identified in Eddy and Dort (2011) that aim to capture the overall state of socio-economic conditions of communities as ‘human habitats’. This dataset was developed primarily for application in mapping socio-economic conditions of communities and regions for environmental and natural resource management, climate change adaptation, Impact Assessments (IAs) and Regional Assessments (RAs), and Cumulative Effects Assessment (CEA).The RVI/CVI is comprised of five sub-indicators: 1) population change, 2) age structure, 3) education levels, 4) employment levels, and 5) real estate values. Index values are based on percentile ranks of each sub-indicator, and averaged for each community, and for three ranked groups: 1) all of Canada, 2) by province, and 3) by population size. The data covers the Census periods of 2001, 2006, 2011 (NHS), 2016, and 2021.The index is mapped in two ways: 1) as ‘points’ for individual communities (CVI), and 2) as ‘rasters’ for spatial interpolation of point data (RVI). These formats provide an alternative spatial framework to conventional StatsCan CSD framework. (For more information on this approach see Eddy, et. al. 2020).============================================================================================Eddy, B.G., Muggridge, M., LeBlanc, R., Osmond, J., Kean, C., and Boyd, E. 2023. The CanEcumene 3.0 GIS Database. Federal Geospatial Platform (FGP), Natural Resources Canada. https://gcgeo.gc.ca/viz/index-en.html?keys=draft-3f599fcb-8d77-4dbb-8b1e-d3f27f932a4bEddy B.G., Muggridge M, LeBlanc R, Osmond J, Kean C, Boyd E. 2020. An Ecological Approach for Mapping Socio-Economic Data in Support of Ecosystems Analysis: Examples in Mapping Canada’s Forest Ecumene. One Ecosystem 5: e55881. https://doi.org/10.3897/oneeco.5.e55881Eddy, B.G.; Dort, A. 2011. Integrating Socio-Economic Data for Integrated Land Management (ILM): Examples from the Humber River Basin, western Newfoundland. Geomatica, Vol. 65, No. 3, p. 283-291. doi:10.5623/cig2011-044.

A global decline in seagrass populations has led to renewed calls for their conservation as important providers of biogenic and foraging habitat, shoreline stabilization, and carbon storage. Eelgrass (Zostera marina) occupies the largest geographic range among seagrass species spanning a commensurately broad spectrum of environmental conditions. In Canada, eelgrass is managed as a single phylogroup despite occurring across three oceans and a range of ocean temperatures and salinity gradients. Previous research has focused on applying relatively few markers to reveal population structure of eelgrass, whereas a whole genome approach is warranted to investigate cryptic structure among populations inhabiting different ocean basins and localized environmental conditions. We used a pooled whole-genome re-sequencing approach to characterize population structure, gene flow, and environmental associations of 23 eelgrass populations ranging from the Northeast United States, to Atlantic, subarctic, and Pacific Canada. We identified over 500,000 SNPs, which when mapped to a chromosome-level genome assembly revealed six broad clades of eelgrass across the study area, with pairwise FST ranging from 0 among neighbouring populations to 0.54 between Pacific and Atlantic coasts. Genetic diversity was highest in the Pacific and lowest in the subarctic, consistent with colonization of the Arctic and Atlantic oceans from the Pacific less than 300 kya. Using redundancy analyses and two climate change projection scenarios, we found that subarctic populations are predicted to be more vulnerable to climate change through genomic offset predictions. Conservation planning in Canada should thus ensure that representative populations from each identified clade are included within a national network so that latent genetic diversity is protected, and gene flow is maintained. Northern populations, in particular, may require additional mitigation measures given their potential susceptibility to a rapidly changing climate.Cite this data as: Jeffery, Nicholas et al. (2024). Data from: Variation in genomic vulnerability to climate change across temperate populations of eelgrass (Zostera marina) [Dataset]. https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.xpnvx0kp2

Bivalve aquaculture has direct and indirect effects on plankton communities, which are highly sensitive to short-term (seasonal, interannual) and long-term climate changes, although how these dynamics alter aquaculture ecosystem interactions is poorly understood. Here, we investigate seasonal patterns in plankton abundance and community structure spanning several size fractions from 0.2 µm up to 5 mm, in a deep aquaculture embayment in northeast Newfoundland, Canada. Using flow cytometry and FlowCam imaging, we observed a clear seasonal relationship between fraction sizes driven by water column stratification (freshwater input, nutrient availability, light availability, water temperature). Plankton abundance decreased proportionally with increasing size fraction, aligning with size spectra theory. Within the bay, greater mesozooplankton abundance, and a greater relative abundance of copepods, was observed closest to the aquaculture lease. No significant spatial effect was observed for phytoplankton composition. While the months of August to October showed statistically similar plankton composition and size spectra slopes (i.e., food chain efficiency) and could be used for interannual variability comparisons of plankton composition, sampling for longer periods could capture long-term phenological shifts in plankton abundance and composition related to various processes, including climate change. Conclusions provide guidance on optimal sampling to monitor and assess aquaculture pathways of effects.Cite this data as: Sharpe H, Lacoursière-Roussel A, Gallardi D (2024). Ecological insight of seasonal plankton succession to monitor shellfish aquaculture ecosystem interactions. Version 3.2. Fisheries and Oceans Canada. Sampling event dataset. https://doi.org/10.25607/2ujdvh