Can-Peat 2024 Annual Meeting

The 2024 annual meeting was hosted from February 20-22 in Quebec. The first morning included a presentation and working session led by Andrea Johnston of Johnston Research Inc. dedicated to reading and reflecting on our draft Indigenous engagement manual and case studies to begin filling out our researcher’s engagement plans. We will continue improving our Indigenous engagement manual and hope to share it publicly soon.

In the afternoon, our two advisory committees met and discussed the project's direction and progress. The committees also gave helpful feedback on improving international, national, and student collaboration and communication. Three of our HQP; Marissa Davies (PDF), Elle Amro (PhD), and Kendra Shields (RA), gave presentations on their research activity progress.

On the second day, we jointly hosted the Peatland Science Symposium with the Peatland Ecology Research Group (PERG). At this public event, Can-Peat and PERG researchers, fellows, students, and partners presented their work on peatland research topics such as restoration, carbon cycling, policy, and new harvesting methods.

The final day was dedicated to our metadata repository, now renamed as the Canadian Peatland Data Portal. We shared a demo of the current web interface of the data portal and received very helpful feedback on improving the site's usability and visual representation of data.

Next year we hope to host the annual meeting in Alberta.