For its major crossing of Canada in 2021, the AKOR team is committed to contributing to the advancement of knowledge of northern ecosystems, building on what distinguishes it from conventional research: its ability to travel long distances in an integral manner and at a pace that allows it to stop temporarily anywhere to sample.
The first scientific mandate of the AKOR expedition in 2021 will be to continue sampling wood from boreal forest enclaves along major wild rivers, this time in Saskatchewan. This research effort will make it possible to expand the project begun in the summer of 2018 to the west of the country, in order to compare the results obtained in northern Quebec. This comparison is crucial in order to extend our knowledge of northern forest ecosystems to the entire Canadian territory.
The second scientific mandate of the expedition is the result of the association between the AKOR expedition, the Laboratoire des Sciences de l’Activité Physique de l’Université Laval (LABSAP) and the Université du Québec à Rimouski (UQAR). The data collected and shared between the two universities will allow a better understanding of the adaptive mechanisms of the human body in situations of very long duration efforts under extreme conditions (cold, wind, etc.).
With climate change, the increasing number of environmental researchers and other workers visiting Arctic regions is driving research to try to better understand the risks and the tools that can be provided for their safety. The AKOR expedition can help observe the impact of the northern environment on crew members, but also validate a set of inexpensive tools to monitor their health. Due to the very small number of participants in these research projects, it is crucial to follow this expedition as much as possible in order to understand what strategies should be used in the future. This project is a crucial opportunity to observe and validate telehealth tools that could help future workers, researchers and adventurers visiting Arctic environments and ensure their optimal safety.
Through several measures to track the workload and estimate the caloric expenditure of expedition members, researchers will be able to assess the demands placed on the bodies of adventurers during their expedition. Extensive monitoring will also be done in the months and years following the expedition to document the long-term effects on basal metabolic rate and how the body now expends the energy it has available.
