News

The week of December 11-15, 2023, Ecohydrology Research Group members presented their research at the 2023 AGU Fall Meeting. This annual conference is being held as a hybrid event, with the in-person session being held in San Francisco. With nearly 24,000 attendees, the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting is the largest Earth and space science meeting in the world.

Katie Hettinga, a first year MSc student in ERG, won first place for her talk at the Cold Regions Research Centre Days Conference 2023. Her project focuses on CO₂ dynamics in the winter, or non-growing season, across Canadian peatlands, how these dynamics function relative to the growing season, and what they mean for annual CO₂ budgets.

Ecohydrology group PhD student Bowen Zhou successfully defended his thesis on Wednesday, December 6, 2023 via a hybrid defence. Bowen’s thesis is titled "Modelling effects of stormwater best management practices on urban stormwater runoff phosphorus." 

Following the recent publication of an article in The Conversation about the threat of applying road salt to roads in the winter to water quality in both groundwater and lakes, Philippe has given a number of interviews about the recent work about salinization to various CBC stations.

On November 30, the LoCo2 project was launched at the Danish Technical University (DTU) in Lyngby, Denmark. The project is led by Dr. Hamid Nick of the Danish Offshore Technology Centre at DTU. LoCo2 will focus on the journey CO2 and other fluids will take to the seabed following a future storage site leak. 

Philippe presented an invited talk at the International Workshop on Organic-Water-Rock Interaction, OWRI 2023, held 24-26 November in Beijing. 

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. By Jovana Radosavljevic, Jiangyue Ju and Water Institute members David L Rudolph, Fereidoun Rezanezhad, Nancy Goucher and Philippe Van Cappellen.

...For decades, applying road salt has been regarded as a simple but vital tool in countering the dangers of slippery road conditions, but the downsides of its use are apparent with implications that extend beyond the cold months...

Steph Slowinski, Research Biogeochemist in ERG, attended the third session of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee to develop an international legally binding instrument on plastic pollution, including in the marine environment (INC-3), in Nairobi, Kenya at the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Headquarters on 13-19 November.

Philippe presented the plenary keynote presentation entitled “The Environmental Biogeochemistry of Phosphorus: A tale of too little or too much” at the 12^th National Conference on Environmental Chemistry (NCEC) held on November 17-21, 2023, in Wuhan, China.

Philippe visited China University of Geosciences (CUG) in Wuhan China on November 13-17. The visit included in-depth discussions on collaborations between Waterloo’s Ecohydrology Research Group (ERG) and CUG’s Environmental Hydrogeology Group (EHG).