Madelaine Bourdages
I am a PhD candidate working with Dr. Jesse Vermaire (Carleton) and Dr. Jennifer Provencher (Environment and Climate Change Canada). My research is focused on assessing the sources, transport, and fate of microplastics in Arctic freshwater environments. Specifically, I aim to quantify and characterise microplastics in Great Slave Lake and along the Mackenzie River (Northwest Territories). For this project, I am working in collaboration with several communities throughout the Northwest Territories, including Yellowknife, Fort Providence, Fort Resolution, Inuvik, and Tuktoyaktuk. I am also investigating how geotextiles may contribute to microplastics in a remote Arctic creek located along the Inuvik-Tuktoyaktuk Highway (Northwest Territories). Other projects that I am involved with include comparing microplastics in water and sediment from Qikiqtaruk – Herschel Island (Yukon), Qikiqtarjuaq (Nunavut), and Iqaluit (Nunavut), and looking at microplastics in water and sediment along the Rideau and Trent-Severn waterways (Ontario). I am also a current member of the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme’s (AMAP) Litter and Microplastics Expert Group for Canada.
I began researching microplastics in the environment during my undergraduate degree in Geography at the University of the Fraser Valley (British Columbia), where I assessed microplastics in the surface water of the Fraser River at Fort Langley, British Columbia. It was through my involvement in this project that my passion for understanding plastic and microplastic pollution began developing, which ultimately led me to pursue graduate education to continue with similar research. I completed my MSc in Geography at Carleton University in 2020 with Dr. Jesse Vermaire and Dr. Jennifer Provencher where I assessed plastic ingestion, retention, and transport in animals from the eastern Canadian Arctic. Specifically, I looked at the retention of plastics in seal stomachs collected through subsistence hunting from communities in Nunavut, as well as microplastic deposition via seabird guano at two large seabird colonies on eastern Baffin Island, Nunavut.