Manitoba Rural Adaptation Council

Ducks Unlimited Canada is hoping the information generated from a project funded by the Manitoba Rural Adaptation Council will lead to programming that will encourage restoration and preservation of wetlands to protect water quality.

“Until now there hasn’t been much work done on nutrients and water quality in prairie wetlands so the goal of this project was to look at a series of six drained wetlands and six intact wetlands in the Manitoba prairie pothole region,” says Pascal Badiou, a research scientist with Ducks Unlimited Canada’s Institute for Wetland and Waterfowl Research.

The Broughton’s Creek watershed near Rivers, Man. was a good fit for the project as DUC had already completed a wetland inventory and change assessment for the watershed, which allowed drained and undrained wetlands to be identified.

The project involved conducting a series of measurements to determine what volume of water was flowing in and out of drained and intact wetlands, and how that impacted downstream water quality. Soil and sediment samples from the drained and undrained wetlands were also collected.

“The project went very smoothly. We were able to collect an enormous amount of environmental data in the watershed, which is really needed in this region of Manitoba because we don’t have a lot of monitoring stations in that area,” says Badiou, who found the project results both expected and surprising.

He noticed that drained wetlands tended to be “hot spots” for nutrient export, which means there’s a greater amount of phosphorous and nitrogen coming off these drained landscape features.  

“Therefore, in terms of water quality, it makes more sense to keep wetlands on the landscape to prevent damage to downstream water quality,” he says.

Badiou also discovered that it’s crucial to sample during the spring melt period. He noted that in spring almost all the nutrients were present in dissolved form. This is typically a time when very little sampling is done.

“We need to focus more on the spring melt period for water quality monitoring in order to build better nutrient budgets for Lake Winnipeg, the Assiniboine River, the Red River and other water bodies,” he says.

The project, which began in September 2007 and ended this past May, was funded through Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada adaptation programming delivered by MRAC.

“The MRAC funding for this project was instrumental in helping us develop the Broughton’s Creek watershed into what we want to be the first model experimental watershed representative of the Manitoba prairie pothole region,” says Badiou. “It’s an important region in terms of agriculture and wetland and waterfowl habitat.”

This MRAC-funded project laid the foundation for another project, supported by the Environment Canada Lake Winnipeg Basin Stewardship Fund, where Ducks is monitoring the entire Broughton’s Creek watershed, notes Badiou. 

For more information on Ducks Unlimited Canada visit www.ducks.ca.

~ Teresa Falk, MRAC Communications Officer

Photo: Pascal Badiou, a research scientist with Ducks Unlimited Canada's Institute for Wetland and Waterfowl Research, samples water at the Broughton's Creek watershed near Rivers, Man. Photo courtesy Ducks Unlimited Canada.