The study rests on 22 semi-structured interviews with municipal officials, philanthropic funders, non-governmental organization leaders, Indigenous representatives, and community organizers across Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, supplemented by participant observation at a regional climate adaptation event. Participants were recruited through purposive and snowball sampling, with data collection continuing until thematic saturation was reached. All interviews were recorded, transcribed verbatim, anonymized, and analyzed through an inductive thematic approach, allowing themes such as funding access, policy support, and barriers to collaboration to emerge from the data rather than being imposed in advance. The work received ethical approval from the Grenfell Campus Research Ethics Board and forms part of a larger transdisciplinary project on collaborative governance in financing climate adaptation and mitigation.

Conceptually, the research is anchored in the Socio-Ecological Systems framework, which treats communities not as isolated units of adaptation but as nodes embedded within interconnected social, institutional, and ecological systems. From this perspective, the most effective adaptation strategies emerge from feedback loops between community experience, institutional support, and environmental change. The author also frames the translation of local knowledge as a three-stage process: recognition, in which local knowledge is acknowledged as a valid source of environmental information; valuing, in which it gains real influence over the priorities and design of adaptation plans; and use, in which it is applied alongside scientific tools to concrete planning decisions, such as combining elders’ memories of past shoreline positions with geospatial mapping.

The findings are striking in their consistency: local knowledge is central to building climate resilience, not peripheral to it. Participants described a rich tapestry of knowledge forms, from fishers’ observations of shifting marine species to the Traditional Ecological Knowledge held by First Nations, Inuit, and Métis Peoples, which reflects generations of observation of seasonal change, animal behaviour, and land management. The study also highlights the concept of Two-Eyed Seeing, introduced by Mi’kmaq Elder Albert Marshall, which calls for weaving Indigenous and Western ways of knowing together rather than treating them as competing systems. One participant captured the grassroots ethos succinctly, explaining that the work is not about telling communities what to do but about communities receiving support and encouragement for what they are already doing and want to do.

In practice, this knowledge is being mobilized through four broad categories of adaptation activity. Education and outreach initiatives, including arts communication projects and museum preservation efforts responding to shoreline erosion, rely heavily on cultural knowledge and build public engagement. Community and skills-building efforts, such as public education sessions and community-garden knowledge-sharing, transmit expertise effectively at small scale. Natural infrastructure projects, including living shorelines and regenerative agriculture, showed the deepest integration of traditional ecological knowledge, drawing directly on longstanding local practices. Community planning initiatives, particularly municipal climate advisory committees with formal community representation, demonstrated the strongest institutional uptake. In one municipality, eight community consultation sessions on climate adaptation directly informed local plans, while in another, five of twelve council seats were held in ways that fostered trust and shared responsibility.

Yet the study documents a persistent gap between recognition and substantive use. Systemic barriers, including rigid, short-term funding programs, top-down policy frameworks, and heavy bureaucratic requirements, continue to limit the consistent and equitable application of local knowledge. One participant from a community NGO criticized federal funding structures as formulaic, with everything prescribed in advance and little room for genuine collaboration. A municipal official noted the absence of internal resources to adequately cover climate programs, and another organization described the lack of continuity between short grants as very harmful to progress. Smaller and rural communities face particular disadvantages, forced to compete against large municipalities with dedicated administrative staff for funding opportunities they often lack the capacity to pursue.

Equity concerns surfaced repeatedly. A community foundation representative pointed to Nova Scotia’s history of environmental racism and suggested it extends to adaptation efforts, underscoring the need to embed climate justice principles in planning. Volunteer burnout emerged as another strain on smaller organizations. At the same time, participants identified clear enablers: strong local leadership, grassroots engagement that lets communities define their own priorities, collaborative governance, and flexible funding arrangements. Multi-year funding commitments were described as a game changer, allowing organizations to plan and sustain projects rather than lurching from one grant cycle to the next.

The role of partnerships proved double-edged. Multi-stakeholder platforms connecting municipalities, Indigenous groups, and NGOs were praised for pooling resources and building legitimacy, with one program coordinator noting that such partnerships ensure local knowledge shapes coastal resilience projects. But power dynamics matter enormously. One community organizer observed that input is often sought while final decisions ignore community priorities, such as protecting cultural sites. This distinction between being consulted and having actual influence echoes the scholarly argument that meaningful knowledge co-production requires redistributing decision-making authority, not simply inviting participation. The clearest cases of effective collaboration in the study were precisely those where such redistribution occurred.

Federal policy frameworks received a mixed assessment. Canada’s National Adaptation Strategy was seen as supportive in principle but weak in practice, with one provincial program planner observing that it encourages local knowledge while lacking clear guidelines for implementation. Large funding programs, such as the 41-million-dollar Climate-Resilient Coastal Communities initiative running from 2023 to 2028, provided essential resources, enabling one Nova Scotia municipality to hire local experts to map erosion risks based on community input. But access inequities persist, and rigid use-case restrictions can leave communities unable to pay for what they actually need most: staff and people. By contrast, municipal-level policies establishing climate advisory committees were praised for creating goodwill by giving community members a formal voice in decision-making.

The study concludes that resilience cannot be delivered from the top down; it must be built through collaboration and continuous learning across the system. The author calls for policy shifts to institutionalize long-term, locally controlled funding, formalize community participation in decision-making, and embed equity-centered, co-productive approaches into adaptation frameworks. Without these enabling conditions, the role of local knowledge risks being reduced to a symbolic gesture rather than serving as a core driver of adaptation. The findings carry weight well beyond Atlantic Canada, offering a template for any jurisdiction grappling with how to move beyond token acknowledgment of community expertise toward climate action that is adaptive, context-specific, and grounded in the lived realities of the people who know their places best. As the author notes, the study’s qualitative design offers transferable insight into similar rural and coastal contexts rather than statistically generalizable conclusions, and future research probing how local knowledge shapes the most contentious decisions, such as managed retreat, would be a valuable extension.

Subject of Research: Integration of local and Indigenous knowledge into community climate change adaptation planning in Atlantic Canada

Article Title: Place-based climate adaptation: How Atlantic Canadian communities translate local knowledge into action

Article References: Yirenkyi, E. (2026). Place-based climate adaptation: How Atlantic Canadian communities translate local knowledge into action. PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, 5(10), e0000291. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pstr.0000291

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pstr.0000291

Keywords: climate adaptation, local knowledge, Indigenous knowledge, Atlantic Canada, socio-ecological systems, co-production, climate governance, funding, coastal communities, participatory planning, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland

The study matters because nitrogen is the engine of corn production. The nutrient sits at the center of photosynthesis, protein synthesis, and biomass accumulation, and Maritime provincial recommendations call for roughly 115 to 150 kilograms of nitrogen per hectare to reach economically viable yields. Yet corn typically recovers only a fraction of what is applied. Losses occur through ammonia volatilization, nitrate leaching, denitrification, nitrification, and surface runoff, eroding nitrogen use efficiency, inflating production costs, and raising environmental concerns. Enhanced-efficiency fertilizers were designed to close that gap by slowing the transformation or release of nitrogen in soil, ideally synchronizing availability with the crop’s uptake curve.

The two products tested work by fundamentally different mechanisms. Polymer-coated controlled-release urea relies on a physical barrier whose permeability changes with soil temperature and moisture, metering out nitrogen over weeks or months. Stabilized fertilizers, by contrast, use chemistry rather than coatings: SuperU contains N-(n-butyl) thiophosphoric triamide to slow urea hydrolysis and dicyandiamide to inhibit nitrification, the microbial conversion of ammonium to nitrate, which is the form most vulnerable to leaching. Whether either strategy pays off, however, depends heavily on environment, and Atlantic Canada presents a distinctive one: a short growing season, cool spring soils that slow both crop uptake and soil microbial activity, and precipitation patterns that swing widely from year to year.

The experimental design was deliberately practical. Fifteen fertilizer treatments were arranged in randomized complete block designs at Truro, Nova Scotia in 2024 and at the Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada Research Station in Harrington, Prince Edward Island in 2024 and 2025. Treatments spanned conventional urea, both enhanced-efficiency products, single versus split applications, nitrogen rates of 75, 100, 125, and 150 kilograms per hectare, and one-to-one blends of each specialty product with uncoated urea. The researchers measured grain yield at 15.5 percent moisture, test weight, hundred kernel weight, harvest index, agronomic efficiency, partial factor productivity, and a partial return on investment calculated against fertilizer cost alone.

When the data were combined across site-years, fertilizer source, application timing, and their interaction showed no significant effect on grain yield at the standard 125-kilogram rate. The story sharpened only when results were parsed by site. At Harrington in 2024, splitting nitrogen between planting and roughly the six-leaf stage lifted yield to 9.31 tonnes per hectare from 8.43 tonnes for a single application, and also raised agronomic efficiency from 27.6 to 34.6 kilograms of grain per kilogram of nitrogen applied. But that advantage vanished at the other site-years. Notably, the split benefit appeared in the year with the driest May and June, hinting that early-season rainfall patterns, not fertilizer chemistry, may govern whether a second pass with the spreader is worth the diesel.

The reduced-rate hypothesis fared no better as a general rule. The researchers asked whether enhanced-efficiency products could maintain yield at lower nitrogen rates, an idea supported by earlier work in northeastern Australia where inhibitor-treated fertilizer performed as well as urea with ten kilograms less nitrogen. Here, the answer was stubbornly site-specific. At Truro in 2024, where a prior manure application and a soybean rotation had built substantial residual fertility, the unfertilized control itself yielded a remarkable 7.40 tonnes per hectare, muting differences among all fertilized treatments. At Harrington in 2025, a much drier year in which growing-season precipitation fell to 299.7 millimeters and August delivered just 12.2, yields dropped roughly 30 percent and SuperU outperformed the polymer-coated product on yield, test weight, and efficiency metrics, with higher nitrogen rates generally winning. The authors caution that without direct measurements of soil moisture or nitrogen fluxes, the mechanism behind that product difference cannot be pinned down.

Perhaps the most commercially intriguing result concerned blending. Mixing the expensive specialty products half-and-half with ordinary urea, matched by nitrogen content, produced no significant yield, quality, or efficiency penalty relative to full-rate enhanced-efficiency treatments at any site-year. Under the assumed prices, with urea at CAD $839 per tonne, SuperU at $1,386, and PurYield at $1,288, blending cut fertilizer costs by roughly CAD $65 to $74 per hectare. A break-even analysis showed those savings could absorb a yield reduction of about 0.22 to 0.25 tonnes per hectare before the economics turned negative. Since the blends showed no measurable yield penalty, the strategy looks like a low-risk entry point for producers hesitant to commit fully to premium fertilizers, though the authors stress the thresholds shift with any change in fertilizer or grain prices.

The economic analysis also revealed how much background soil fertility shapes the payoff from any nitrogen strategy. At Truro, partial returns on investment did not differ significantly among treatments, a consequence of the site’s high native nitrogen supply. At Harrington, where crops depended more heavily on applied nitrogen, fertilizer treatment strongly influenced returns in both years, with the unfertilized control and single applications of plain urea generally faring worst. Intriguingly, the highest 150-kilogram rate did not consistently improve returns, suggesting that choosing the right rate for the field matters more than choosing the flashiest product.

Grain quality told a subtler story. Test weight, a proxy for kernel density, responded to fertilizer management at the Harrington site-years, with the highest values in split-applied treatments and high-rate SuperU, while hundred kernel weight remained essentially flat everywhere. That pattern implies nitrogen availability during grain filling influences how densely kernels pack rather than how large they grow, consistent with earlier maize research showing nitrogen supply affects grain filling and protein accumulation more than kernel size.

The overarching lesson is one of humility toward one-size-fits-all fertilizer marketing. Site-year accounted for 71 to 96 percent of the total variance across response variables, dwarfing treatment effects. Enhanced-efficiency fertilizers, the authors conclude, are best viewed as components of an integrated nitrogen management system rather than stand-alone yield boosters. In Atlantic Canada’s humid, variable Maritime climate, their value may lie in expanding the menu of management options, particularly through cost-saving blends, rather than in delivering guaranteed harvest gains. For farmers, the calculus remains local: soil history, rainfall, and price spreads, not product labels, should drive the decision.

Subject of Research: Agronomic and economic performance of enhanced-efficiency nitrogen fertilizers in Atlantic Canadian grain corn production

Article Title: Grain corn response to enhanced-efficiency nitrogen fertilizers under different rates, timings, and blending strategies in Atlantic Canada

Article References: Lynds, B., MacEachern, D., McLean, N., Lumactud, R., Smith, E., & Jiang, Y. (2026). Grain corn response to enhanced-efficiency nitrogen fertilizers under different rates, timings, and blending strategies in Atlantic Canada. Journal of Agriculture and Food Research, 31, Article 103313. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jafr.2026.103313

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.jafr.2026.103313

Keywords: grain corn, nitrogen fertilizer, enhanced-efficiency fertilizers, controlled-release urea, nitrification inhibitors, split application, nitrogen use efficiency, Atlantic Canada, 4R nutrient stewardship, fertilizer blending, agronomic efficiency, return on investment