Over the past 14 years, Oliver Sonnentag has traveled to the North over 50 times, sometimes alone, but most often accompanied by graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and other researchers. Together, they have: – measured carbon and water dynamics in Arctic and boreal ecosystems; – used measurement chambers and micrometeorological techniques such as eddy covariance to study methane and carbon dioxide absorption and emissions; – utilized Earth observation and artificial intelligence to map changes in composition and structure in forests, peatlands, and tundra; – collaborated with researchers from Mila – the Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, affiliated with UdeM, and with IVADO – the Artificial Intelligence Research and Transfer Institute, to model Arctic and boreal ecosystems using various numerical models and, more recently, data-driven models.
At each stage, scientists have taken into account local populations.
“Once, the white man arrived with money and bulldozers, plowing the land to exploit hydrocarbons,” says Oliver Sonnentag. “Today, it is scientists from around the world who, instead of extracting natural resources, extract data. For whose benefit? Their own, unless they share this knowledge with the communities from which it originates. Tell people how quickly the snow will melt, and they can prepare.”
In parallel, Oliver Sonnentag is collaborating with Berlin-based illustrator Dominik Heilig and partners from the Liidlii Kue First Nation in Fort Simpson on “Fire on the Land,” a journalistic graphic novel that recounts some of the work done by his team in the Northwest Territories. The work is set to be unveiled in May at the Comic Invasion festival. It depicts a devastating fire that occurred in the fall of 2022, destroying the Scotty Creek research station, the first Indigenous-led scientific facility in Canada; it has since been rebuilt.
Occurring just before the hottest year ever recorded globally, this fire highlighted the challenges facing northern Canada, a vast territory dominated by vulnerable ecosystems of boreal forests, peatlands, and lakes.
To better understand how increasing natural and human pressures are affecting peatlands in Quebec, Oliver Sonnentag and colleagues from McGill University, the Université du Québec à Montréal, the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, and Laval University have embarked on establishing a provincial carbon flux observation network called CARBONIQUE. Supported by AI software funded by IVADO and developed at Mila, this network aims to use science and technology to better monitor and understand what the climate future holds for Quebec’s ecosystems – and ultimately, for Canada and society as a whole.
“Canadian ecosystems – from the Arctic tundra to northern peatlands and boreal forests, to wetlands on the prairies, coastal marshes, farmland, and urban environments – play a central role in climate regulation,” says Oliver Sonnentag. “Building on the legacy of the Fluxnet-Canada research project from 2001 to 2014, as well as CARBONIQUE, we are now working on implementing a coordinated national next-generation system called CanFlux to track exchanges between ecosystems and the atmosphere in a context of rapid climate change.”
