Climate Change and Arctic Char: A Story of Resilience and Collaboration
In the pristine, icy waters of the Arctic, a remarkable fish with a red-pink belly plays a crucial role in sustaining millions of lives. The Arctic char, a close relative of trout and salmon, has been a staple food source for Arctic communities for millennia. However, this delicate ecological relationship is now facing unprecedented challenges as climate change transforms the region at an alarming rate—warming two to four times faster than the rest of the world.
At the forefront of understanding these changes is Marianne Falardeau, a polar marine ecologist at Université TÉLUQ in Quebec City, Canada. Her groundbreaking research explores how climate change is reshaping boreal and polar marine ecosystems and the benefits these ecosystems provide to people. In 2022, she co-authored an important study that outlined strategies to make small-scale Arctic fisheries more resilient in the face of our changing climate. “The Arctic is warming up to four times more rapidly than the rest of the world,” Falardeau explains. “This phenomenon, called Arctic amplification, has a range of biophysical impacts, including the decline of sea ice cover. These climatic changes affect plants, animals, and humans who live in the Arctic—and also beyond the Arctic. We’re all connected to this region of the world.”
What sets Falardeau’s research apart is her collaborative approach with Indigenous communities, whose knowledge spans thousands of years of living with the land and sea. For another significant study in 2022, she combined scientific biophysical data on Arctic char with observations made by Inuit fishers to track how environmental changes had shifted fish migration patterns over three decades. This partnership revealed valuable insights into how seasonal ice changes influence fish diet and nutrient quality—connections that might have been missed through conventional scientific methods alone. “In the Arctic, there are Indigenous people who have been living there for millennia—they have deep knowledge about the land, the ocean, the animals, and how they’re changing,” she emphasizes. “My research wouldn’t be possible without these connections.”
This collaborative approach has yielded remarkable insights that neither scientific data nor traditional knowledge could have produced alone. Falardeau recounts a revealing example: “In one of my projects, our biophysical data showed that what the fish were eating was more typical of the open ocean, and we were trying to form hypotheses for why we were seeing that. At the same time, I was conducting interviews with Inuit knowledge holders and fishers about their observations of changes. Some elders told me they were observing char farther away from the shore. They believed it was because the shallow water near the beaches was warming more rapidly than deeper areas, causing the fish to stay further from shore.” This observation perfectly complemented the biological data on the fishes’ diets, allowing researchers to form more comprehensive hypotheses about how climate change was affecting Arctic char behavior. “These two different observations required different ways of being on the land,” she notes. “When you’re fishing and you live there, you have these granular observations of behaviors that, as scientists, we might miss because we’re there for shorter periods.”
Falardeau’s work represents a new paradigm in ecological research—one that brings together diverse perspectives to address complex challenges. “We bring together different lenses to study how the Arctic is changing,” she explains. “The goal is to understand social-ecological systems today, but then explore what they might be like in the future, to be better prepared.” This approach involves not just scientists from different disciplines but also Indigenous knowledge holders and resource managers. Through collaborative workshops, these diverse experts explore possible futures for Arctic ecosystems and develop strategies for creating “the best possible future outcomes for future generations.”
Beyond her scientific contributions, Falardeau is also helping to break down barriers in field research. She acknowledges the challenges women face in academic and field settings, from practical concerns like field equipment designed primarily for men to larger systemic issues like the “leaky pipeline” that sees fewer women advancing to higher academic positions. “At the undergraduate level, you have almost 50-50 percent female and male students in the universities. And as you go up the academic ladder, you have less and less women able to keep going in this field because there are more barriers to being a woman, being a mom in academia,” she observes. While acknowledging that measuring the immediate impact of her research can be challenging, Falardeau remains optimistic: “I’m very hopeful about the future because I see a big shift in academia and many changes happening to allow for this kind of process and research.” Through her innovative, collaborative approach to studying Arctic ecosystems, Falardeau is not only advancing our understanding of climate change impacts but also pioneering a more inclusive, holistic way of conducting environmental research—one that may prove essential for helping both ecosystems and communities adapt to our rapidly changing world.
