News

Congratulations to Kyle Knysh on his new publication:

Knysh, K.M., S.C. Courtenay, C.M. Grove and M.R. van den Heuvel. 2021. The differential effects of salinity level on Chlorpyrifos and Imidacloprid toxicity to an estuarine amphipod. Bulletin of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology. Published online: 01 March 2021. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00128-021-03157-z.

This is the first publication from Kyle’s doctoral work and Carissa’s first published paper!

Friday afternoon November 27 Sondra successfully defended her doctoral thesis: Learning from Experience to Advance the Operationalization of Integrated Coastal and Marine Management.

Sondra’s exam committee was: Dr. Kelly Vodden (External Examiner; Associate Vice President Research and Graduate Studies, Grenfell Campus, Memorial University), Dr. Rob Stephenson (Internal/External Committee Member; Senior Research Scientist, DFO-Saint Andrews Biological Station), Dr. Derek Armitage, Dr. Rob de Loë and Dr. Simon Courtenay.

Sondra, a PhD candidate in Courtenay Lab, recently co-led a collaborative book chapter for an OceanCanada Partnership book initiative with Dr. Rob Stephenson (Expected publication in 2021). Sondra’s supervisor Dr. Simon Courtenay was included among the eight other co-authors from across Canada. The book chapter focuses on the ‘bright spots’ in integrated management of Canada's oceans and coasts. The chapter evaluates seven integrative initiatives to summarize lessons for future practice significant for aligning long-term sustainability, management, and community development.

This past week, Master’s student Mark McCarthy participated in an online workshop on PRIMER v7 statistical software presented by Distinguished Professor Marti Anderson. The workshop was originally scheduled for the spring at the Huntsman Marine Science Centre in St. Andrews, New Brunswick. Unfortunately, this was cancelled due to COVID-19 concerns. The workshop was rescheduled to be online. Although it was disappointing that the workshop was not held in beautiful New Brunswick, it is good to see that we can adapt to these uncertain times and keep moving forward.

Mark hopes to apply what he learned at this workshop to his own research. Where he is looking at the benthic macroinvertebrate communities in a section of Blair Creek that is undergoing urban development. PRIMER will be used to help analyze the community assemblages in this area and determine if there has been changes during the years of urban development.

Nothing about a river is straight, nor is its management straightforward. I quickly learned from my exploratory research, evaluating monitoring indicators in the Muskoka River Watershed, that the supposedly simple task of generating a list of environmental indicators for monitoring watershed health was more about social equity, communication, organizational capacity and partnerships, than it was about managing the watershed – at least at that stage in the monitoring program’s development.

Natural gas reservoirs were first discovered in Ontario in 1866, and drilling to extract the new source of energy began in the early 1900s. Since then, thousands of natural gas wells have been drilled in southwestern Ontario. As extraction became inefficient due to the depletion of gas reservoirs, many of these wells were abandoned.

University of Waterloo granted me sabbatical leave in 2018 to go and learn something new which I could bring back to my research and teaching at the School of Environment, Resources and Sustainability. Something I had always wanted to know more about was the Healthy Land and Water program in South East Queensland, Australia.

Sondra Eger, a PhD Candidate in the Courtenay Lab,  spent the summer of 2018 as a Huntsman Marine Science Center Research Fellow based in St. Andrews, NB where she completed data collection for her PhD thesis.

Elaine's research, which aims to develop a robust monitoring framework for the lower Grand River/nearshore Lake Erie area, has evolved considerably to incorporate the following themes: multi-jurisdictional coordination (e.g., of local, regional, national and binational authorities), making Indigenous knowledge and ways of knowing an underlying guide to the ways in which we monitor and report on watershed health, and aligning monitoring goals and approaches with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

My 2018 summer was spent in the field with Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s Asian Carp Program. Since its inaugural field season in 2013, this program has continued to monitor major tributaries of the Great Lakes’ Huron-Erie-Ontario corridor as part of its annual early detection of Asian carp efforts. At each water system, electrofishing and various nets are used to capture both juvenile and adult fish. Beyond surveying for Asian carps (and other invasive fishes) this sampling builds critical baseline data on the basin’s native fish populations.