MANITOULIN—Liam Campbell has lived on the Island his entire life and his family has lived here for seven generations. His first position with the Manitoulin Streams Improvement Association (MSIA) was made possible through joint funding to Manitoulin Streams and the Climate Risk Institute to begin collecting data to build a baseline to determine weather trends and project the effect of climate change. However, after the year of funding expired, the project fell by the wayside.
Mr. Campbell studied Environmental Science at Carleton University and Environmental Management and Assessment at Algonquin College.
“A lot of what I went to school for wasn’t applicable, but some of it is,” Mr. Campbell shared in a recent interview with The Expositor. “I grew up here and always loved being outdoors, which works for me. My education was more geared towards the environmental departments of construction and development, but that was not in line with why I wanted to get involved in environmental studies, so working in the non-profit sector is much more rewarding for me at the end of the day.”
Mr. Campbell says that most of his work in that first year revolved around collecting existing data from what few sources were available, including Environment Canada and the weather station at Gore Bay Airport. Unfortunately, the Gore Bay weather station was the only local source with data far back enough to establish trends.
“I was just looking at all of the information and trying to establish trends and projections for the future,” he explained. “Until 2017, we had data, but we haven’t been able to update it in the last few years because it depended on funding. That was my first position at Manitoulin Streams. The data on trends are still valid, but they need updating.”
Mr. Campbell did seek out other types of data, including resourcing from community members and other organizations on the Island, like the Lake Manitou Area Association.
“I did go out and get information about lake levels and ice cover.,” Mr. Campbell continued. “Some private citizens have been keeping track of some of these things, such as ice in and ice out on Ice Lake. A small amount of data is available for different parts of the Island, so I compiled it in a file. It is based on the available information, so it needs to be completed because precipitation data is much less trustworthy than the sources I had available, especially because they cover such a short time frame. Some of the data only reaches back to the ‘70s. I held public engagement meetings to inform people about the project and to see if anyone in the community had been collecting data. Unfortunately, the only work I could complete was establishing the trends with the data already available.”
Currently, the Manitoulin Streams organization is focused on restoration work toward mitigating climate risks and carbon sequestration across the Island, albeit on a minimal scale.
“We aren’t able to plant entire forests, but we are rehabilitating areas affected by industry and development,” he added. “Repairing areas is very important in terms of biodiversity because many of the sites have been devegetated, and the impacts of climate change on rivers and streams are increasing quite a bit. There is no canopy cover to provide shade to the water and the species living there. The temperatures in the streams are creating consequences.”
The crux of the restoration work around rivers is increasing vegetation and shade cover because many local fish species require cold waters to spawn. Because many of the streams and rivers on the Island are spring-fed, they remain consistently cold from the source.
“It comes out of the ground cold, but if it runs through an area with no vegetation or tree cover, that water will warm up, and that stream essentially becomes hostile for certain species of fish to lay their eggs,” Mr. Campbell explained.
Manitoulin Streams uses references to flora across the Island dating back to studies done in the 1970s. When the team selects plants to propagate, they look back to studies before invasive and non-native plants began to take hold. The older studies also include information on species they believe are cultivars from people’s gardens. The team does its best to ensure that they are using plants that are not only native to Ontario but specific to the Island. While the species planted at each site might be different from those sites initially, they try to discern which species might have been there before the locations were impacted by development. Manitoulin Streams remains conscientious of propagating plants that won’t cause harm to the sites they are rehabilitating.
“The reason there is such an emphasis on the salmon is that they are so visible, because there is a large salmon run and they are such a big fish so it is something that gets the public involved, gets them outdoors to observe a migration of nature and in a ‘you should want to protect this stream’ mindset,” he said. “In environmentalism, you often try to pick one species that everybody cares about in the hopes that you can fix the stream for everything that would be living there.”
While many laypeople believe that climate change is an increase in temperature, it is rapid fluctuations that stand to cause the most damage to ecosystems, something many Islanders are already seeing.
In 2019, the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry investigated a die-off of a high number of fish in Lake Manitou, where dozens of fish were washed ashore.
“A whole bunch of whitefish wound up dying in Lake Manitou and floated up,” Mr. Campbell said. “Many people needed clarification about why that was happening. What had happened was that the water temperature spiked fast and all the oxygen was sucked out of the water. The fish were in a shallow bay, and when that temperature went up, they all just suffocated and floated to the surface. That is something we have been seeing more in the Michigan area. We aren’t seeing it as much as they are yet, but it’s something that’s happening, and it’s moving north, so that is something we could see occurring more in the future. Large-scale fish die off in the summer when we have those dramatic temperature swings.”
Mr. Campbell hopes the climate assessment baseline can be picked back up with community and local business involvement.
“The data that we had access to wasn’t representative of each community on the Island, so there is potential for having our network of private citizens using backyard climate stations so we can start collecting our data, and I think there are individuals that would be interested in doing some citizen science stuff,” he added. “I think it would be great to get all of the communities involved. I always thought it would be an excellent idea to study what is also happening within our lakes.”
Manitoulin Island is unique in its three eco-zones: Boreal, Great Lakes-St. Lawrence and Carolinian, and diverse species worth preserving for the next seven generations.
To reach Mr. Campbell send him an email to liam.manitoulinstreams@gmail.com.
