News

Philippe attended a side event at the UN Water Conference on Committing to Action for Global Freshwater Lakes was held at the Permanent Mission of Canada to the United Nations. The event focused on actions that accelerate positive change for large, global, transboundary freshwater lakes. Speakers from the African and North American Great Lakes organizations shared their experiences and plans for advancing the integrated management of their large lakes.

A delegation from the Water Institute, headed by Roy Brouwer, Executive Director of the Water Institute, is attending the 2023 United Nations Water Conference taking place at the UN Headquarters in New York, 22-24 March. Philippe Van Cappellen is part of the delegation.

Cold regions are warming much faster than the global average, resulting in more frequent and intense freeze thaw cycles (FTCs) in soils. A new paper published in the journal Chemosphere investigated the effects of FTCs on toluene biodegradation using a combined experimental and model approach. The paper is authored by Mehdi Ramezanzadeh, a recent Masters graduate and current research assistant in the Ecohydrology Research Group.

A new paper in Science of the Total Environment presents a reaction-transport model to simulate the multi-year fate and transport of phosphorus (P) in a bioretention cell facility in the greater Toronto metropolitan area.  The paper is authored by Bowen Zhou, a PhD student in ERG. Co-authors from ERG include Mahyar Shafii, Chris T. Parsons, Elodie Passeport, Fereidoun Rezanezhad, Ariel Lisogorsky and Philippe Van Cappellen.

The Ontario Geological Survey, the Geological Survey of Canada, and Conservation Ontario hosted the 2023 Open House for the southern Ontario Groundwater Community on February 21 and 23. The open house objective was to update groundwater researchers, practitioners and water managers on the activities of the respective agencies and collaborators.

The following posters were presented on February 23 by our ERG members

The Ecohydrology Research Group hosted a successful 11th Annual World Wetlands Day Research Symposium at the University of Waterloo on Wednesday February 1, thanks to the efforts not only of our group but also that of wetland researchers across the University.

Selenium (Se) is an essential micronutrient but becomes toxic when people are exposed to excess levels. A new paper published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology presents a detailed analysis of the Se distribution in the cold region mollisol agroecosystems of northeastern China. The results indicate that the Se can be sourced back to chemical weathering of oil shales from the watershed source area and deposited along with organic matter during the fluvial deposition.

An article co-authored by Zahra Akbarzadeh, former ERG PhD student Taylor Maavara, Stephanie Slowinski and Philippe Van Cappellen, titled “Effects of Damming on River Nitrogen Fluxes: A Global Analysis” published in the journal Global Biogeochemical Cycles in 2019 was in the top 10 cited articles in Global Biogeochemical Cycles in the 2017-2021 5-year publication period.

Wanfa Wang, a former ERG International Visiting Graduate Student from Tianjin University, published a new paper in the Journal of Hydrology describing his PhD research on carbon cycling in dam reservoirs in karst regions. Co-authors from ERG include Steph Slowinski, Shuhuan Li and Philippe Van Cappellen. Chemical and physical carbonate rock weathering in karst regions supply large quantities of particulate and dissolved inorganic carbon (PIC and DIC) to rivers and, ultimately, to the ocean.

Ecohydrology Research Group Attend AGU 2022