News

Amid the current pandemic situation prohibiting students and faculty from working on campus, the Ecohydrology Research Group has had its first remote thesis defence. Shengde Yu, a member of the Ecohydrology Research Group, successfully defended his MSc thesis today. His thesis is titled "Modeling Phosphorus Cycling in a Seasonally Stratified Reservoir (Fanshawe Reservoir, Ontario, Canada)". Shengde was supervised by Dr. Philippe Van Cappellen, and the other members of the examination committee included Dr. Chris Parsons (Environment and Climate Change Canada) and Dr.

Vadose Zone Journal now features an open access publication by researchers Geertje Pronk, Adrian Mellage, Tatjana Milojevic, Christina Smeaton, Katja Engel, Josh Neufeld, Fereidoun Rezanezhad and Philippe Van Cappellen. The study found that water table fluctuations in soil environments result in localized enhancement of aerobic organic carbon degradation, yielding pulses of carbon dioxide effluxes, driven by a more active, rather than more abundant or compositionally more diverse microbial community.

A new paper in Limnology and Oceanography, co-authored by Ecohydrology Research Group members Philippe Van Cappellen, Fereidoun Rezanezhad, and Tatjana Milojevic assess the carbon release and transformation from coastal peat deposits controlled by submarine groundwater discharge.

The Office of the Chief Science Advisor of Canada and the Global Institute for Water Security jointly organized “Water Day on the Hill” in Ottawa on March 10.

Professor and Canada Excellence Research Chair Laureate Philippe Van Cappellen has been selected to receive an Award of Excellence in Graduate Supervision this year from the University of Waterloo. Prof Van Cappellen was nomimated for the award by his current and former graduate students and the nomination was supported by senior colleagues at the University of Waterloo.

A new paper published in the Journal of Hazardous Materials describes a new DNA-based biosensor that selectively measures concentrations of aqueous divalent mercury (Hg²⁺).

The Ecohydrology Research Group hosted a successful 8th Annual World Wetlands Day Research Symposium at the University of Waterloo on Monday, February 3. It was part of more than 1,200 events held worldwide to spread the important message that wetland biodiversity matters.

A new paper, co-authored by Drs. Stephane Ngueleu, Fereidoun Rezanezhad and Philippe Van Cappellen, has been published in Journal of Geofluids. The article, titled "Biodegradation Kinetics of Benzene and Naphthalene in the Vadose and Saturated Zones of a (Semi)-arid Saline Coastal Soil Environment", was written in collaboration with Drs. Riyadh Al-Raoush and Saeid Shafieiyoun from Qatar University.

In a new paper, ERG members Adrian Mellage, Christina Smeaton, Fereidoun Rezanezhad and Philippe Van Cappellen, together with colleagues from Technion and University of Delaware, describe the results of a fully saturated sand-filled column reactor experiment where the growth of the bacterium Shewanella oneidensis during nitrate reduction to ammonium is monitored using spectral induced polarization (SIP).

A new paper in Water Resources Research, co-authored by ERG members Serghei Bocaniov and Philippe Van Cappellen, assesses the fate of phosphorus loads to Lake St. Clair. The outflow of this fairly large but shallow lake enters Lake Erie, which has been experiencing re-eutrophication since the mid-1990s.