In Nunatsiavut, on the northern coast of Labrador, rivers run like veins from the land to the sea. They carry snowmelt and glacial water from the Torngat Mountains, but also the stories of Nunatsiavimmiut, the Inuit people of Labrador, who travel, fish, and live along the rivers. As climate change alters their flow and the timing of freeze up, a new collaboration—the Nunatsiavut Rivers Project—is reimagining how to study these watersheds by bringing Indigenous knowledge and Western science together.
The project works directly with community members to monitor rivers and understand how they link land, ice, and sea. It is funded through the North American Partnership for Environmental Community Action and led by Sue Ziegler of Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador with collaborators from Dalhousie University, Queen’s University, and the Nunatsiavut Government.
The Hakai Institute, based in British Columbia, is playing a key role in the effort. Known for its expertise in coastal watershed mapping and classification, the institute is expanding that work across Labrador.
Ziegler first connected with Hakai Institute researcher Ian Giesbrecht after acting as an external examiner for his PhD work, which focused on classifying watersheds on the Pacific coast. Giesbrecht’s research separated West Coast watersheds into a dozen categories—from glacierized mountains to rain lowlands— to better understand their influence on the coastal ocean and how they are responding to climate change.. Ziegler saw parallels to the questions facing Inuit communities in Labrador, as well as other remote coastal communities in the region.
The Hakai Institute’s role is focused but crucial: advising on watershed classification that is tailored to the region, providing geospatial expertise, and helping design the tools that support the team's effort to braid local priorities into large-scale mapping.
“When you've got a really large region with a lot of geographic diversity and sparse observations on the ground, you can still do something to make some sense of the geographic variability,” says Giesbrecht, “and make some well-guided predictions about what different rivers are going to look like on the ground.”
For Nunatsiavimmiut, rivers are not just hydrological features; they are integral to well-being and cultural continuity. Through the Nunatsiavut Sea Ice Observer Program, knowledge holders have tracked changes in ice, snow, and rivers for years. Their observations now guide the Nunatsiavut Rivers Project’s science.
Known as the local weatherman in the community of Hopedale, Labrador, Reuben Flowers has been tracking daily temperature, weather, storms, and ice thickness since 1992 in half a dozen handwritten notebooks. Now part of the Nunatsiavut Sea Ice Observers Program, his long-term climate observations are the sort of invaluable local knowledge the Nunatsiavut Rivers Project leans on.
From Hopedale, on the exposed rocky outer coast, it’s a two-hour boat or snowmobile ride inland to the nearest rivers—yet many community members still make the long trip to fish, hunt, and collect firewood and drinking water. Mirroring changing sea ice conditions, Flowers notes that the region’s frozen rivers are opening up faster and earlier than in past years, creating dangerous conditions for those venturing upriver as temperatures warm in the spring.
“You might travel over the ice one day, and the next day after a high tide and a really warm day, your tracks are panned up and you’ve got to go right along the edge closer to the shoreline,” says Flowers.
Maurice Jacque is part of the Nunatsiavut Sea Ice Observer Program and supports the river monitoring design and implementation in the Kaipokok and English Rivers near Postville, Labrador.
“In the winter, ice becomes our road,” he says. “As winter gets shorter it feels like our world is shrinking.”
During the summers, Jacque supervises the English River counting fence, where they track numbers of Atlantic salmon and culturally important Arctic char that migrate upriver to spawn.. He and other community members have noticed the impact warmer waters and low river levels have had on Arctic char.
“This network of local experts in the Nunatsiavut Sea Ice Observers Program has really been the basis of developing the questions and the focus of this particular project with the rivers,” says Ziegler. “Whether it’s char or ice conditions for travel, rivers end up being really important.”
For example, when Inuit participants raised concerns about changing river ice, researchers adjusted their methods. Hakai’s Santiago Gonzales Arriola developed new GIS approaches to quantify freeze and melt patterns—variables not considered in the institute’s earlier work on the west coast.
The science is also becoming more interactive. Emma Harrison, a research associate with Memorial and Dalhousie universities, created an app that allows collaborators to test different watershed classifications. With a few clicks, scientists and community advisors alike can explore scenarios, compare outcomes, and help decide which models best reflect lived experience.
What began as a focus on Nunatsiavut soon grew. To understand river-coastal interactions and responses to climate change, researchers had to expand their area of study across the continent to Hudson Bay, the Labrador Sea, as far as the Rocky Mountains, capturing the diversity of landscape-marine ecosystem intersections.
“Effectively, between this project and our West Coast project we’re mapping all of the watersheds, coast to coast,” says Giesbrecht.
That scale matters. Rivers link inland changes to coastal seas, influencing fisheries, sea ice, and ecosystems. As warming reshapes snow and permafrost, knowing which rivers are most vulnerable—or most crucial—becomes a tool for adaptation.
Ziegler says that this locally focused information helps small marine communities respond and adapt to climate change. “Through their desire to maintain that connection to the land, the Indigenous communities here provide a really good example for the rest of us.”
The Nunatsiavut Rivers Project is as much about process as results, and Ziegler hopes this project will be a model for other communities to learn about their own rivers and coastal ecosystems. By weaving together satellite data and local stories, researchers are building a new kind of watershed science—one rooted in both climate models and cultural priorities. For Inuit participants, the work affirms that their lived knowledge is not an afterthought, but the starting point.
