News

Over the past 50 years, phosphorus (P) has been added each year to Lake 227, making it the world’s longest experiment in P fertilization. Located in Canada’s Experimental Lakes Area, Lake 227 conclusively demonstrated that excess phosphate in lakes causes algal blooms, in turn leading to worldwide bans on phosphates in detergents, improvements in wastewater P removal, and reductions in fertilizer applications. A key question, however, is: Where did the P added to Lake 227 end up? This is where David O’Connell and Philippe Van Cappellen of the Ecohydrology Research Group, together with colleagues from Canada, Netherlands, and USA, turned to examining phosphorus in the sediments accumulating at the bottom of the lake.  

Yuki Audette, Chris Parsons, Fereidoun Rezanezhad and Phillippe Van Cappellen of the Ecohydrology Research Group co-authored a paper titled “Phosphorus binding to soil organic matter via ternary complexes with calcium”, which was recently published in Chemosphere.

A recent paper co-authored by Ecohydrology Research Group members has been featured in the latest edition of CSA News, the magazine of the Crop Science Society of America, Soil Science Society of America, and American Society of Agronomy. The feature, titled “Carbon Cycling in Periodically Waterlogged Soils”, presents highlights of an experiment studying the effects of a fluctuating water table on organic matter dynamics in soil columns.

The prevalence of Urinary Stone Disease (USD) or urolithiasis has been increasing over the past few decades. In this new paper published in Science of the Total Environment an international team from China University of Geosciences, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and the Ecohydrology Research Group present evidence that the spatial distribution of USD can be explained to a large degree by geo-environmental conditions, including lithology, water chemistry and climate.

A new paper in Earth-Science Reviews, co-authored by Ecohydrology Research Group members Colin McCarter, Fereidoun Rezanezhad, and Philippe Van Cappellen reviews the role of pore structure on the hydrological and (bio)geochemical processes governing peat and peatlands.

A new editorial co-authored by Ecohydrology researcher Fereidoun Rezanezhad, along with collaborators Colin McCarter and Bernd Lennartz, was recently published in Frontiers in Environmental Science. The editorial is a summary of the Research Topic “Wetland Biogeochemistry: Response to Environmental Change.”

A study co-authored by Fereidoun Rezanezhad was recently featured in WaterResearch, a communication that summarizes high impact scientific articles published by researchers of the Water Institute. The paper, titled “Winter CO₂ losses shift the Arctic to a carbon source under current and future climates,” was originally published in Nature Climate Change.

Professor Matthew Ginder-Vogel has been named a 2020 Research Award Winner by the Wisconsin Section of the American Water Works Association.

Matthew Ginder-Vogel is the Principal Investigator of a project in collaboration with the Ecohydrology Research Group on "Particulate organic matter (POM) transport and transformation at the terrestrial-aquatic interface" funded by the US Department of Energy - Biological and Environmental Research.

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.