Our Mission
Our lab has a single mission: to restore freshwater ecosystems to full health and vitality for the benefit of future generations.
The Healthy Headwaters Lab uses science to connect Land, Water and People. Based in the traditional territory of the Three Fires Confederacy of First Nations – the Odawa, Ojibway & Potawatomi – the Healthy Headwaters Lab and members are grateful to get to do this work in service to Nayaano Nibiimang Gichigamin – the Five Freshwater Seas.
The science is clear: Restoring relationships to Land and Water are essential for successful ecosystem and freshwater restoration. In pursuit of research excellence and beneficial societal impacts, our team intentionally prioritizes partnerships and knowledge co-production to facilitate trust-based relationships, collaboration and capacity strengthening. We work locally and globally, recognizing solidarity across diverse cultures and knowledge systems in advancing ecosystem and planetary health and well-being, now and for future generations.
Our team blends diverse ways of knowing and doing, cultures, faiths, knowledge systems and learning pathways in the work we choose to pursue.
We foster a team of PIs, co-PIs, mentors, staff and students who all see themselves as learners. Together we work to provide science services, offer technical training and facilitate partnership coordination. We support both degree (i.e., BSc, MSc, PhD) or land-based, non-degree learners (i.e., Indigenous Guardians, field and lab crew, community-based pracitioners) who work in a blended team, learning together, helping each other and participating in community-engaged research and projects. We are science helpers who support land and water healers, and we are all kin.
Our science tools are primarily focused on biodiversity and water quality monitoring that is integrative of molecules, benthic macroinvertebrates (including Unionid freshwater mussels) and ecosystem processes across land and water (ecotones). We seek to generate a holistic picture of ecosystem health in our research, using knowledge co-production and syntheses to generate deeper understandings of the relationships between land, water and people, anthropogenic impacts including restoration and mitigation, and the complementarity of undesired (“invasive”) and desired species (aquatic species at risk) who inhabit local freshwater ecosystems. We honour storytelling as an important part of our science, recognizing that storytelling has been critical to the transmission of science-based observations, language, culture and knowledge since time immemorial.
We pursue a more relational approach to science, working with those who have responsibilities to care for Land and Water, and hope to use our science to strengthen capacity and decision-making at individual, team, local and global levels.
We take our work seriously, but never ourselves. We call ourselves the HOMIES in celebration of Lakes Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie & Superior and you can find us celebrating individual wins and laughing at field flops and fails as collective opportunities for growth.
We acknowledge with gratitude the Land, Air, Water, Fire and all the beings of creation that sustain us. We honour the longstanding relations of many First Peoples to this place since time immemorial (including the Anishnaabe, Haudenosaunee, Lunaapee, and Huron/Wendat Peoples). We acknowledge colonial harms and we commit to renewed and respectful relationships with Nature, People and Place.
Everything is connected. Water connects us all, and has so much to teach us about a more relational approach to science.
In the spirit of kinship and friendship, welcome to our website.