Spring, 2025
Ian Bradbury uses DNA technology to understand what aquatic species — whether Atlantic salmon, cod, crab or lobster to name just a few — Eastern Canada has and how they might respond to stressors such as climate change.
“We look at how things are adapted to the environment using genetic and genomic tools and then we use machine learning and climate models to look at how they might respond in the future,” explains Bradbury, a research scientist with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and an adjunct professor at Dalhousie and Memorial Universities. (Genetics is the study of how genes work while genomics is the study and mapping of genomes, or the full set of genetic instructions for an organism.)
The goal is to be able to make projections in terms of the rate of change happening with a specific species, as well as how it will respond to climate change and how that might impact fisheries and other stakeholders using those resources in the future.
The classic example, he says, is Arctic char in Labrador, which is culturally important for Indigenous groups along the coast, ecologically important because it’s the dominant freshwater coastal fish species there and notable because it's at the southern portion of its range in Labrador.
“So it would not be surprising that climate change might be pushing it northward,” Bradbury says. “And we've done a lot of work over the last couple of years, some of it using ACENET, to understand how Arctic char in Labrador and north of that, are adapted to their climate and then how climate change might affect that.”
Bradbury is building a baseline or map of genetic variation in Arctic char. His projections suggest that the Arctic char’s range will start moving north, meaning the southern portion of Labrador will no longer be suitable for char, which will have implications for the people living in the area and for the ecosystems that remain there.
Bradbury and his team need ACENET because genetic tools generate massive datasets — multiple terabytes in fact — and since data management and data analysis are most of what they do, they couldn’t do their work without ACENET.
“We don't have access to the computational power that my students would need to do these sorts of analysis,” Bradbury says.
The students he supervises are sequencing the entire genomes of aquatic species and then analyzing them for differences among individuals and populations.
“We're making associations with climate on a set, and we're doing projections for future impacts,” Bradbury says.
While there are other options out there, he says, ACENET is particularly useful because it’s accessible to students. His research team includes students at all levels and postdocs at both Atlantic campuses.
