The Canadian Environmental Sustainability Indicators (CESI) program provides data and information to track Canada's performance on key environmental sustainability issues. The Wildlife habitat capacity on agricultural land indicator maps the relative value of farmland for wildlife. The indicator provides a multi-species assessment of broad-scale trends in the potential ability of the Canadian agricultural landscape to provide suitable habitat for populations of terrestrial vertebrates. Information is provided to Canadians in a number of formats including: static and interactive maps, charts and graphs, HTML and CSV data tables and downloadable reports. See supplementary documentation for data sources and details on how those data were collected and how the indicator was calculated.

The Canadian Environmental Sustainability Indicators (CESI) program provides data and information to track Canada's performance on key environmental sustainability issues. The Wildlife habitat capacity on agricultural land indicator maps the relative value of farmland for wildlife. The indicator provides a multi-species assessment of broad-scale trends in the potential ability of the Canadian agricultural landscape to provide suitable habitat for populations of terrestrial vertebrates. Information is provided to Canadians in a number of formats including: static and interactive maps, charts and graphs, HTML and CSV data tables and downloadable reports. See supplementary documentation for data sources and details on how those data were collected and how the indicator was calculated.

The Government of Canada’s Fuel Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) Model is a tool to calculate the life cycle carbon intensity (CI) of fuels and energy sources used and produced in Canada.

Widespread agricultural use of neonicotinoid insecticides has resulted in frequent detection of mixtures of these compounds in global surface waters. Recent evidence suggests that neonicotinoid mixtures can elicit synergistic toxicity in aquatic insects under acute exposure conditions, however this has not been validated for longer exposures more commonly encountered in the environment. Therefore, we aimed to characterize the chronic (28-day) toxicity of imidacloprid, clothianidin, and thiamethoxam mixtures under different doses and mixture ratios to determine if the assumption of synergistic toxicity would hold under more environmentally realistic exposure settings. The sensitive aquatic insect Chironomus dilutus was used as a representative test species, and successful emergence was used as a chronic endpoint. Applying the MIXTOX modeling approach, predictive parametric models were fitted using single-compound toxicity data and statistically compared to observed toxicity in subsequent mixture tests. Imidacloprid-clothianidin, clothianidin-thiamethoxam and imidacloprid-clothianidin-thiamethoxam mixtures did not significantly deviate from concentration-additive toxicity. However, the cumulative toxicity of the imidacloprid-thiamethoxam mixture deviated from the concentration-additive reference model, displaying dose-ratio dependent synergism and resulting in up to a 10% greater reduction in emergence from that predicted by concentration addition. Furthermore, exposure to select neonicotinoid mixtures above 1.0 toxic unit tended to shift sex-ratios toward more male-dominated populations. Results indicate that, similar to acute exposures, the general assumption of joint additivity cannot adequately describe chronic cumulative toxicity of all neonicotinoid mixtures. Indeed, our observations of weak synergism and sex-ratio shifts elicited by some mixture combinations should be considered in water quality guideline development and environmental risk assessment practices for neonicotinoid insecticides, and explored in further investigations of the effects of neonicotinoid mixtures on aquatic communities.

In recent years, neonicotinoid use has been linked to collapses of honey bee colonies; however, relatively little is known about their impacts on vertebrate wildlife. Amphibians in particular are excellent vertebrate bioindicator organisms because they are sensitive to environmental stressors and their dual aquatic/terrestrial life cycle may leave them more vulnerable to neonicotinoid exposure. Our preliminary work suggests wood frogs (Lithobates sylvaticus) are sensitive to environmentally relevant concentrations of neonicotinoids. Our proposed project builds on our previous studies and is two-fold: 1) to examine the direct effects of neonicotinoids on frogs using laboratory and mesocosm exposures and, 2) to determine the concentrations of neonicotinoids in the environment using sensitive time-integrating samplers (POCIS) and assess the effects of neonicotinoids on amphipods exposed in situ.

Neonicotinoids are the most widely used insecticides in the world and selective toxicity has resulted in the rapid and ubiquitous use of these compounds. Neonicotinoids are a class of neuro-active insecticides chemically similar to nicotine and are widely used in agriculture to protect crops from various insects. They are also used for other purposes, including killing insects in homes, controlling fleas on pets, and protecting trees from invasive insects such as the Emerald Ash borer. To date Imidacloprid is the most widely used insecticide in the world. The neonicotinoid family focused in this study includes acetamiprid, clothianidin, imidacloprid, dinotefuran, thiacloprid and thiamethoxam. The objective of this study was to collect and assess fish health metrics and neonicotinoid concentrations in water from four creeks and streams (Cedar Creek, Hillman Marsh, Sturgeon Creek, and Lebo Creek) within Essex County, Ontario Canada.