This Quarter at Trebek
Issue #7
| March 18, 2026
TREBEK MONITORS
THE NORTH
Photo Credit: Patrick Kane
IN THIS ISSUE:
Across Canada’s North, environmental conditions are shifting in ways that affect travel, harvest, and daily decision-making. Trebek Grantees are working alongside northern and Indigenous partners to monitor these changes, pairing scientific tools with land-based knowledge to support practical application at the community level.
TREBEK MONITORS THE NORTH: Bruno Tremblay works with communities to measure sea ice conditions that shape travel and safety. Malkolm Boothroyd tracks caribou migration across changing landscapes. Susan Kutz monitors muskox health as Arctic ecosystems warm. Patrick Kane documents food insecurity and traditional harvests in northern communities facing rising costs and shifting access.
EXPANDING INDIGENOUS-LED FIRE STEWARDSHIP: After initial Trebek support, 2023 Grantee Kira Hoffman’s collaboration with the Gitanyow Nation continued through new federal funding. In 2025, the Gitanyow Nation partnered with additional First Nations to share cultural burning practices and strengthen local capacity.
NEWS FROM THE FIELD: Recent awards and recognition for Trebek Grantees, along with final reports from projects completed this quarter, offering insight into their findings and impact.
FEATURED PROJECT: 2024 Trebek Grantee Taylor Roades is following ancient ice patches melting across the Yukon’s high alpine plateaus, recording exposed cultural artifacts and Indigenous-led recovery practices with partners from the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations.
TREBEK MONITORS
Tracking environmental shifts shaping travel, harvest, and daily life across Canada’s North.
In many northern communities, change is felt first on the land. Freeze-up arrives at different times. Ice that once held steady can no longer be assumed. Herds shift their paths. Access to country food depends on conditions that are harder to read than they were a generation ago.
The projects in this issue follow those realities closely. They work with Indigenous knowledge holders and community observers who spend long days on the land and ice. The focus is simple: understand what is happening and document it carefully so communities have clearer information when decisions need to be made.
Bruno Tremblay
Bruno Tremblay - Early Sea Ice Thickness Monitoring
In many Arctic communities, winter travel depends on knowing when ice can be trusted. Increasing variability in sea ice thickness and stability has made those judgments more difficult, narrowing the window for safe movement across landfast ice. This variability reflects warming air temperatures and changing snow depth, which insulates the ice and slows growth.
Bruno Tremblay worked with northern communities to design and test a low-cost, rechargeable ice-thickness buoy that can be deployed before freeze-up. Following a successful prototype test in winter 2024–2025, deployments are expanding into northern communities to support local decision-making around winter travel. By pairing local on-ice experience with simple, durable measurement tools, the project is expanding access to real-time ice thickness information and strengthening community-led ice monitoring.
2023 Trebek Grantee
Malkolm Boothroyd · Walking with Caribou
Caribou migrations continue to guide seasonal decision-making across the North, even as access to herds becomes more constrained. Development pressures, land-use planning, and climate-driven change are reshaping where and how caribou move on the land.
Malkolm Boothroyd worked with Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in partners to document the Fortymile caribou herd through photography and community storytelling. The project documents how shifting caribou routes are influencing land-use decisions in the Yukon. His reporting for The Narwhal, including Yukon’s Fortymile caribou and the future of land-use planning, connects the herd’s movements to ongoing habitat and development decisions in the Yukon.
Susan Kutz · Combatting Trace Element Deficiencies in Muskoxen in a Changing Arctic
Changes in muskox health can serve as early signals of broader environmental stress. Warming conditions are altering forage quality, parasite exposure, and nutrient availability, with consequences for animals and for the communities that rely on muskox harvests.
Susan Kutz and her team, worked with northern partners to assess muskox health through field sampling and community-based monitoring. Her research confirmed very low selenium levels across Somerset Island herds and expanded a growing Arctic wildlife health database, linking trace-element status to population trends. This work has also contributed to public awareness, including coverage in Canadian Geographic’s Muskoxen: the tundra’s ultimate survivors.
Photo Credit: Patrick Kane
Food Security and the Future of Traditional Harvests
Patrick Kane · The Fight for Healthy Food in Canada’s North
Changes in muskox health can serve as early signals of broader environmental stress. Warming conditions are altering forage quality, parasite exposure, and nutrient availability, with consequences for animals and for the communities that rely on muskox harvests.
Susan Kutz and her team, worked with northern partners to assess muskox health through field sampling and community-based monitoring. Her research confirmed very low selenium levels across Somerset Island herds and expanded a growing Arctic wildlife health database, linking trace-element status to population trends. This work has also contributed to public awareness, including coverage in Canadian Geographic’s Muskoxen: the tundra’s ultimate survivors.
Photo Credit: Malkolm Boothroyd
What Muskox Health Reveals About Warming Arctic Ecosystems
Susan Kutz
2023 Trebek Grantee
Patrick Kane
2021 Trebek Grantee
Photo Credit: Patrick Kane
Following Caribou Pathways Across a Changing Landscape
How Changing Sea Ice Shapes Travel and Safety
THE NORTH
Malkolm Boothroyd
2022 Trebek Grantee
EXPANDING INDIGENOUS-LED FIRE STEWARDSHIP
In partnership with the Gitanyow Nation, Kira Hoffman’s Trebek-supported work contributes to a growing model of Indigenous-led wildfire resilience.
In northwestern British Columbia, cultural burning shaped forest ecosystems for generations. Intentional fire renewed berry patches and medicinal plants and maintained forest structure. These practices were suppressed for more than a century, contributing to the wildfire risk many forests now face.
Through her Trebek-supported project, Fighting Fire with Food, Kira Hoffman partnered with the Gitanyow Nation and the Gitanyow Huwilp to reintroduce cultural fire practices on their Lax’yip. The work brought ecological field research together with Indigenous fire knowledge to understand how intentional burning supports forest health and enhances community food security. Explore the full story.
Project Outcomes:
> Cultural burns implemented across more than 200 hectares on Gitanyow Lax’yip
> Gitanyow Lax’yip Guardians lead burn monitoring and evaluation with indicators aligned to their stewardship priorities
> In 2025, the Gitanyow team completed certification as a Type 2 wildland firefighter crew, expanding their capacity to respond to wildfire and carry out cultural burns safely
> Engagement with provincial regulators contributed to changes that better enable the use of cultural fire on Crown land
> A harvested area near the community has been designated as a huckleberry management area. Instead of being replanted, it will be stewarded through cultural burning to enhance berry production and support community food security
>Knowledge and methods from the Trebek-supported project are now being shared with three neighbouring First Nations
Across Canada, Trebek Grantees are working in environments that range from freshwater deltas and Arctic icefields to inland forests, coastal ecosystems, and culturally important places.
Taken together, these projects show where field research and community knowledge are deepening our understanding of Canada’s natural and cultural landscapes. 🔽 Scroll down to view the map. Hover over a point to learn more about each project.
A BIRDS-EYE VIEW OF ALL FIFTY PROJECTS
Project Focus Area:
Land
Water
Wildlife
History & Culture
EXPLORE OUR NEWEST PROJECTS
New funding supports National Geographic Explorers active in Canada.
ARIEL WALDMAN (Ontario, Yukon, Northwest Territories, and Nunavut)
Open Video Library of Canadian Microorganisms
Microbial life is the foundation of every ecosystem on Earth, critical for human health, forming the base of food webs and driving essential nutrient cycles in the environment, and yet it remains largely invisible and overlooked. Working alongside Dr. Jackie Goordial from the University of Guelph, Ariel will create a free Creative Commons video library showcasing microorganisms in Canada. The videos, shared with clear explanations, will help people appreciate the vital role microbes play in Earth’s ecosystems and provide a new resource for Canadian microbiologists.
ANNIE SAKKAB (Quebec)
Disposable Forests: The Boreal Forest Sacrificed for Softness
Canada’s boreal forest serves as a massive carbon sink, storing the equivalent of twice the world’s annual carbon emissions, and provides habitat for countless species, including the threatened boreal caribou and billions of migratory birds. For millennia, it has also sustained the cultural, spiritual, and material lives of more than 600 Indigenous communities. Yet today, this ancient forest is being logged at an alarming pace to make disposable consumer products, especially toilet paper and tissues. Annie’s photography project aims to raise awareness of the destruction of boreal forests to produce toilet paper products. She will work in tandem with local activists and partners groups to drive awarness, policy change and influence consumer choices.
RYAN TIDMAN (British Columbia)
Rise of the Marmot
Rise of the Marmot is a short documentary about the dramatic comeback of the Vancouver Island marmot, once reduced to fewer than 30 wild individuals. Following a young captive-born marmot released into a recovering colony, the film blends striking natural history footage with stories from scientists, Indigenous knowledge holders, and conservation teams. Intimate and hopeful in tone, it highlights how dedicated stewardship is helping restore one of Canada’s most endangered species to its mountain home.
MAIA WIKLER (British Columbia)
A Nation's Fight to Remember: Ancient Forests as Living Memory for the Ma'amtagila
On Vancouver Island, logging is destroying some of the world’s last ancient temperate rainforests—ecosystems vital to the Ma’amtagila Nation’s identity, culture, and ancestral history. As old-growth trees are felled, culturally significant sites such as CMTs and bentwood burial boxes are being lost. Maia will develop a photo essay and documentary that follows Ma’amtagila leaders, archaeologists, and forestry scientists as they work to locate and protect ancestral evidence in the remaining old-growth forests and reconnect Ma’amtagila youth with their culture, while supporting the Nation’s legal fight to reclaim their unceded territory.
DORIAN GABORIAU (Quebec and Atlantic Canada)`
Deciphering the natural variability of past forest landscapes and fire regimes: a meta-analysis based on lake sediment records from eastern Canada
Extreme fire seasons are becoming more common in North America’s boreal forests due to climate change, threatening major global carbon stores. To understand how these forests have historically responded to environmental shifts, Dorian’s project will analyze lake sediments (using charcoal and pollen) to reconstruct long-term fire and vegetation histories. By collecting sediment records from understudied regions in southern Quebec and conduct a large-scale synthesis of existing paleoecological fire data from eastern Canada, the resulting datasets will clarify broad ecological patterns and help inform future forest management and conservation strategies by improving predictions of boreal forest resilience under climate change.
UPCOMING EVENTS
Don’t miss the chance to engage with National Geographic Explorers through events across Canada, offering unique opportunities to connect and discover the impact of their work.
February 8-10, 2026 | Toronto, ON
National Geographic Live – Doug Smith: Wild Wolves of Yellowstone
Witness the beauty and wonder of Yellowstone National Park with wildlife biologist Doug Smith, who led the reintroduction of wolves in this legendary American landscape.
March 22-24, 2026 | Toronto, ON
National Geographic Live - Nalini Nadkarni: From Roots to Canopy
Climb into the clouds with tree canopy ecologist Nalini Nadkarni to experience the world's hidden in the treetops above our heads.
February 12, 2026 | Vancouver, BC
National Geographic Live – Tracy Drain: Cosmic Adventures
Explore our cosmic neighborhood with aerospace engineer and National Geographic Explorer Tracy Drain. Drawing on two decades at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Drain shares how robotic spacecraft reveal the mysteries of our solar system and beyond, from rovers on Mars to the Europa Clipper mission now headed for Jupiter.
April 21, 2026 | Vancouver, BC
National Geographic Live - Steve Ramirez: Untangling the Mind
Join neuroscientist and National Geographic Explorer Steve Ramirez as he uncovers how memories form, fade, and shape who we are. His cutting-edge research with mice reveals how targeted memory work could one day help reduce the impact of PTSD and depression.
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THANK YOU
Your commitment fuels our Trebek Grantees’ efforts to make a meaningful impact across Canada, whether they’re uncovering solutions to urgent challenges, preserving cultural heritage, or inspiring the next generation of scientists, storytellers, and educators.
Together, we’re igniting a passion to preserve across Canada.
