Our 13th annual World Wetlands Day was a success!

The Ecohydrology Research Group (ERG), in collaboration with the Wetland Soils & Greenhouse Gas Exchange Lab and the Waterloo Wetland Laboratory, hosted another successful World Wetlands Day Research Symposium at the University of Waterloo on Monday February 3rd, 2025. This was the 13^th year that the University of Waterloo celebrated World Wetlands Day.

World Wetlands Day is held annually to mark the day when the United Nations Convention on Wetlands was adopted in 1971 in Ramsar, Iran. The Convention is an international agreement acknowledging the importance of wetlands and plays a central role in the wise use and conservation of these critical ecosystems.

The Waterloo symposium included a poster session featuring 45 posters covering a wide range of research topics related to wetlands. Eleven ERG undergraduate and graduate students, along with early career researchers, presented their research at the poster session. In the evening, Dr. Hilary Dugan, an associate professor at the Center for Limnology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison gave a distinguished lecture titled “Should we care about freshwater salinization?”, which had over 150 registrants.

The following ERG members presented their research at the poster session:

Adit Sinsinwal: Double trouble: Salinization amplifies eutrophication symptoms in North American lakes
Ali Reza Shahvaran: Spatiotemporal Analysis of Chlorophyll-a Concentrations in Western Lake Ontario and Hamilton Harbour from Landsat Imagery (2013–2023)
Amir Reshadi: Urban Catchment Microplastic Emissions and Retention in Stormwater Management Ponds
Celina Cayabyab: Investigating environmental controls on methane fluxes in Canadian peatlands
Cynthia Bova: Strong temperature correlations shown in a season of high frequency sampling of methane ebullition in two southern Ontario stormwater ponds
Della Zhou: The Role of Littoral Vegetation and Open Water Greenhouse Gas Fluxes on the Carbon Budget of Urban Stormwater Ponds
Katie Hettinga: Non-growing season contributions to the annual net carbon dioxide budget in Canadian peatlands
Noelle Starling: Looking at the Impact of Reservoirs across the Lake Winnipeg Basin on Nitrogen and Phosphorus Loads and Transport Through C-Q Modeling
Wenxin Wu: IPCC Emission Factor Overestimates N₂O Emissions from Agricultural Ditches
Xiaochuang Bu: Trends of Carbon Loads in Arctic Rivers of North America from 2000 to 2023
Yitong Wan: Global role of ponds in greenhouse gas budgets: Large-scale data analysis

Many thanks to Philippe Van Cappellen, Maria Strack, Fereidoun Rezanezhad, Rebecca Rooney, Steph Slowinski, Victoria Van Cappellen, Bhaleka Persaud, and Tia Jenkins for their help in organizing the day's events. We also offer special thanks to Science Outreach and the Water Institute for promoting the event.