News

The 2021 International Workshop on Surface-Earth System Science was held September 27-28 in Tianjin under the theme “The Surface Earth System and Sustainable Development”. The School of Surface-Earth System Science (SESS) previously organized workshops in 2018 and 2019. Because of the pandemic, the 2020 workshop was cancelled.

The paper "Nutrient Leaching in Soil Affected by Fertilizer Application and Frozen Ground" authored by Kirsten N. Grant, Merrin L. Macrae, Fereidoun Rezanezhad, and W. Vito Lam has recieved the 2021 Outstanding Paper Award in Vadose Zone Journal! 

Congratulations to the team! 
Read more about it here: 

A short paper entitled “Rescuing Historical Climate Observations to Support Hydrological Research: A Case Study of Solar Radiation Data”, presented at the ACM Symposium on Document Engineering 2021 (DocEng ’21), outlines research for establishing an efficient and accurate process of digitizing paper-based climate data. The framework for this work was set up by evaluating the performance of two optical character recognition (OCR) engines, namely Tesseract OCR and ABBYY FineReader.

The 2021 Virtual One Health International PhD and Postdoc Summer School on “Environmental Pollution: From soils to human health” focussed on the fate, transport and health effects of contaminants in the environment. The program ran from Monday August 9 to Friday August 13. It included 10 keynote lectures given by leading national and international scientists, providing participants with detailed overviews of the key issues concerning environmental pollutions and their connections to global health.

A new paper in Soil Biology and Biochemistry co-authored by Ecohydrology Research Group member Dr. Fereidoun Rezanezhad presents the mechanisms underlying how soil freeze-thaw cycles induces a pulse of nitrous oxide (N₂O) emissions and how the soil aggregates and carbon and nitrogen substrates fuel this pulse.

ERG's paper on Peatlands and Climate Change has a feature in The Times of India! This work was conducted by Arash Rafat, and his supervisors Fereidoun Rezanezhad and Philippe Van Cappellen!

The feature can be found HERE. 

The Goldschmidt conference was again virtual in 2021. It was held on July 4-9. Check out ERG’s presentations at this year’s Goldschmidt conference:

Zahra Akbarzadeh, Serghei Bocaniov, Helen Powley, Igor Markelov and Philippe Van Cappellen: The role of shallow basins and the littoral zone in modulating lake P cycling: a mass balance analysis of Lake Erie.

Advance publication of review paper on Cold Region Critical Zone research

The review paper entitled “The Cold Region Critical Zone in Transition: Responses to Climate Warming and Land Use Change” in the journal Annual Review of Environment and Resources is now available online. The paper is co-authored by ERG researchers Kunfu Pi (now at China University of Geosciences, Wuhan), Christina Smeaton (now at Memorial University), Fereidoun Rezanezhad and Philippe Van Cappellen, together with colleagues from China, Sweden, France and Russia.

The paper entitled “Consecutive Fe redox cycles decrease bioreducible Fe(III) and Fe isotope fractionations by eliminating small clay particles” was published in the journal Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta by ERG researchers Bingjie Shi, Christina Smeaton, Chris Parsons and Philippe Van Cappellen in collaboration with colleagues from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  The paper presents the very first experimental data on the changes in iron (Fe) isotope fractionation of a Fe-rich clay mineral during successive redox cycles.

ERG's undergraduate student, Arash Rafat's research on climate change and peatlands recently published in Nature Journal, has also had a blog post written about it in the Nature Ecology & Evolution Community. Check it out here: https://natureecoevocommunity.nature.com/posts/climate-change-and-peatlands-increased-non-growing-season-emissions