Global climate warming disproportionately affects cold regions, including northern wetlands and peatlands. These ecosystems are coping with more frequent winter freezing and thawing events, more intense flooding, longer dry periods, changing groundwater-surface water interactions, and altered flow regimes. These changes in hydroclimatic drivers impact landscape hydrological feedbacks, carbon dynamics, biogeochemistry, and greenhouse gas (CO2, CH4, and N2O) emissions to the atmosphere. Therefore, efforts to conserve, restore and manage cold regions’ wetland and peatland ecosystems could help reduce greenhouse gas emissions by enhancing the preservation and storage of carbon and nitrogen in soils and sediments. Further research is needed to advance our understanding of how wetlands and peatlands in cold regions respond to shifts in environmental conditions accompanying warmer climate and how this translates in changes in the mobility and biogeochemical cycling of carbon, nutrients, metals, and pollutants in these ecosystems. This session will focus on interdisciplinary research on hydrological feedbacks, biogeochemical soil processes, microbial-plant interactions, elemental cycling, greenhouse gas dynamics, and water quality in wetland and peatland ecosystems of cold regions. We invite presentations that provide new insights into soil microbial activity, hydrogeochemical processes, and biogeochemical connectivity in peatlands and wetlands, including those in permafrost regions, and changes in carbon and nutrient cycling due to climate warming, land use changes and other human disturbances. Field, laboratory, and modeling studies are all welcome. In addition, studies with specific recommendations for the adaptive management, and the restoration of resilient peatland and wetland ecosystems are also encouraged.

Oral talks:

10:00 - 10:15: Using the Canadian Model for Peatlands (CaMP) to understand spatial and temporal trends in peatland-carbon sink strength across Canada’s Boreal
Presenter(s): Kelly Bona, Research Scientist, Government of Canada, Kelly A. Bona1, Kara L. Webster2 , Daniel K. Thompson2, Oleksandra Hararuk3, Gary Zhang4 and Werner A. Kurz4, (1) Environment and Climate Change Canada, Agriculture Forestry and Other Land Use Change, Pollutant Inventory and Reporting Division, National C

10:15 - 10:30: Hydrologic impacts of multiyear permafrost thaw and landcover change on the water balance of a peat plateau-wetland complex, Scotty Creek, NWT, Canada
Presenter(s): Iain Thomson, Graduate Student, Wilfrid Laurier University, Iain Thomson, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, William L. Quinton 1, Oliver Sonnentag, Département de géographie & Centre d’études nordiques, Université de Montréal, Mont and Stephanie N. Wright 3

10:30 - 10:45: Climate Warming and Winter Carbon Loss in Canadian Peatlands
Presenter(s): Fereidoun Rezanezhad, Research Associate Professor, University of Waterloo, Fereidoun Rezanezhad (Ecohydrology Research Group, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences and Water Institute, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada), Arash Rafat (Department of Geography & Environmental Studies, Wilfrid Laurier University,

10:45 - 11:00: Exploring wildfire risk in Headwater Catchments of the Boreal Plains: The spatial influence of organic soil and soil moisture on fire potential
Presenter(s): Tori Green-Harrison, MSc Student, University of Calgary, Scott Ketcheson, Athabasca University

11:00 - 11:15: Global warming is more likely than nitrogen deposition to promote a transition from moss-dominated to graminoid-dominated wetland tundra in the High-Arctic
Presenter(s): Charles Gignac, , Université Laval, Charles Gignac 1, Line Rochefort 1, Gilles Gauthier 2, Esther Lévesque 3, Vincent Maire 3,4, Lucas Deschamps 3,4, Rémy Pouliot 1,5, Mylène Marchand-Roy 1,6, 1Département de phytologie, Centre d’études nordiques, Université Laval

11:15 - 11:30: Detecting forest-wetland changes in northwestern Canada’s discontinuous permafrost region using Landsat trend analysis
Presenter(s): Olivia Carpino, , Wilfrid Laurier University, Olivia Carpino1*, Jiaao Guo2,3, Stephanie Wright1, Jurjen van der Sluijs2, Ryan Connon4, Kyle Little2, & William Quinton1, 1Cold Regions Research Centre, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, NWT Centre for Geomatics, Government