A summer job up north

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This article was published 24/06/2019 (2349 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Dani Nowosad, of Headingley, is spending her summer in Canada’s Arctic identifying invertebrate species found in ponds and lakes.

She is a research assistant with Polar Knowledge Canada and recently arrived in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut.

Nowosad, 24, who grew up in Headingley, attended Headingley’s Phoenix School and graduated from Winnipeg’s Westwood Collegiate in 2012. She then attended the University of Winnipeg for her undergraduate degree and recently completed a Bachelor of Science with Honours, majoring in physical geography. The work she’s doing this summer will form the foundation of her master of science program in the University of Guelph’s Integrative Biology Department beginning in September.

“On our team, I’m going to be the “aquatic invertebrates person,” meaning I’ll be taking samples from lakes and ponds and bringing them back to the lab so I can identify which species are present — it’s sometimes hard to tell with the naked eye, so I’ll be needing a microscope — and relatively how many of each species are present. In addition, I will be shipping specimens to Guelph where I’ll be responsible for doing some DNA barcoding work, in order to create a genetic catalogue of species found around Cambridge Bay,” Nowosad said in an email message.

Nowosad said the structure of aquatic invertebrate communities is likely to shift as the Arctic continues to warm, and they are great indicators of environmental degradation. For example, they can indicate pollution in freshwater systems. These projects are contributing to an overall understanding of Arctic systems and will help monitor how processes are changing.

Nowosad isn’t a stranger to living in northern communities as she spent her two previous summers working as a seasonal research technician at the Churchill Northern Studies Centre.
She said she was surprised to find that Cambridge Bay’s population is about 1,600 making it larger than Churchill.

“I am grateful for the opportunity to learn first-hand about Inuit culture and about how they live in what we southerners would consider a fairly harsh environment. I am living in the Arctic College residency, which is a nice new building. Polar Knowledge Canada is based out of the Canadian High Arctic Research Station campus, which is where I work. The campus is a brand-new, high-tech, incredibly impressive facility,” Nowosad said.

She added that, while she doesn’t have to worry about paying extremely high prices for food and other staples, this is an enormous challenge for most people living in Canada’s Arctic communities.

As well as continuing her research while pursuing her master’s degree, Nowosad said her goals while at Guelph are to help start a Canadian-American Indian Science and Engineering Society chapter and to present her work at an annual conference for American Indian Science and Engineering Society, an organization for Indigenous people studying and working in science, technology, engineering and math.

She also hopes to volunteer with Ontario Envirothon as she was previously a volunteer with Manitoba Envirothon, both at the regional and provincial competition level. She has served as a guest judge for school science fairs, most recently the St. James -Assiniboia School Division and Frontiers North School Division fairs.