##  [Canadian Prairies Wetland Stressors and Indicators: A Systematic Review to Inform Monitoring and Management ](/resource/canadian-prairies-wetland-stressors-and-indicators-systematic-review-inform-monitoring-and) 

Organization

[Alberta Environment and Protected Areas](/organization/alberta-environment-and-protected-areas)

[University of Waterloo](/organization/university-waterloo)

 

 

Resource Type

[Peer reviewed article](/taxonomy/term/37)

 

 

Author(s)

Danielle Cobbaert

Debora Andrade-Pereira

Marsha Trites-Russell

Nadine Taube

Rebecca Rooney

Vanessa Swarbrick

 

 

Contacts

[Rebecca Rooney](/contact/rebecca-rooney)

 

 

Resource Date:

2026

 

 

Prairie pothole wetlands in the Canadian Prairies Ecozone support ecosystem services such as biodiversity conservation, migratory bird habitat, water purification, and flooy -30d and drought mitigation. They are shaped by natural drivers such as climate and landscape factors, while human activities, including agriculture and urban development, impose pressures such as drainage, contamination, and vegetation alteration. To inform wetland monitoring activities, we systematically reviewed peer-reviewed research on Canadian Prairies Ecozone wetlands and organized empirical relationships using the Driver-Pressure-State framework. We synthesized research scope, identified dominant stressor-response pathways, and evaluated candidate indicators. We compiled 376 studies and extracted 4,379 pairwise relationships among drivers, pressures, abiotic states, and biotic states. Weather and climate, landscape factors such as topography, and agriculture were the most frequently studied drivers, with agriculture representing the dominant anthropogenic driver. Several drivers and pressures were poorly represented, including urbanization, recreation, water flow alterations, vegetation removal, and biological invasion. Abiotic research was concentrated on surface water chemistry and hydrology, while biotic research prioritized organismal metrics such as abundance, biomass, and vital rates over biodiversity metrics such as richness or community composition. The pathway with the highest number of statistical tests linked agriculture to contaminants, surface water chemistry, and biotic responses. Birds were the most frequently studied taxon and had consistent empirical support demonstrating their responses to agriculture, hydrology, wetland extent, and weather and climate, supporting bird abundance and vital rates as candidate indicators in agricultural landscapes. Plants were assessed less often, but existing statistical tests showed a high frequency of significant effects from agriculture, hydrology, substrate physicochemical conditions, and water chemistry, supporting plant abundance as a candidate indicator. Research effort was uneven across taxa, and research coverage did not consistently match the proportional distribution of human footprints to wetlands. This review identifies useful candidate indicators for wetland monitoring while highlighting where additional research is needed to reduce bias and inform conservation and monitoring. We also present an interactive web dashboard that allows readers to query the extracted Driver-Pressure-State relationships and explore the complete evidence base.

KEYWORDS driver-pressure-state, environmental monitoring, evidence synthesis, human footprint (HF), waterfowl