News

Phosphorus (P) applied to the landscape as fertilizer and manure accumulates as legacy within watersheds. A new paper, co-authored by Philippe, presents a model that considers the key processes controlling legacy P accumulation and depletion trajectories along the land-aquatic continuum. The results show that watershed phosphorus legacies continue to degrade water quality over many decades and, therefore, can make it difficult to meet water quality goals.

Philippe Van Cappellen has been elected to this year's class of American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fellows alongside 58 colleagues.

For more information, see the news item released by the Water Institute about this announcement.

Congratulations, Philippe!

Ecohydrology (ERG) and the Water Inisitute collaborated with the Federated Research Data Repository (FRDR) and the Gordon Foundation to host the first workshop on Microplastics data management practises with many members of the Microplastics communitee on September 27th and 28th. 

The workshop aimed to answer and fill in the gaps on: 

1.    Bringing together the microplastics research community to identify strategies to improve microplastics data management through the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable).

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.