News

The Lake Workshop focuses on improving weather forecasting models using satellite data assimilation. The workshop is being organized by Dr. Homa Kheyrollah Pour and Dr. Claude Duguay, and is attended by several members of the Ecohydrology Research Group. Philippe briefly presented the Global Water Futures project to the attendees. The workshop is supported by the Water Institute.

The kick-off meeting of the 21 projects funded through the 2016 Water JPI Joint call takes place in Stockholm. The call is supported by funding agencies from 22 countries, including Canada, and the European Commission. The Water JPI projects focus on the sustainable management of water resources in agriculture, forestry and freshwater aquaculture.

Philippe visits the Norwegian Institute for Water Research (NIVA) in Oslo to discuss ongoing and future collaborations on lake biogeochemical modeling with Raoul-Marie Couture. Philippe also gave a seminar summarizing the results of the work of Taylor Maavara on the impacts of damming on riverine nutrient fluxes.

Environmental Science and Technology (ES&T) announced its best papers of 2016. The journal published around 1600 papers last year. In each of the following four categories a top paper and three runner-ups were selected: Environmental Science, Environmental Technology, Environmental Policy and Feature. The first runner-up in the category Environmental Science is a paper by Bingjie Shi, PhD student in the Ecohydrology Research Group.

Adrian Mellage, a PhD student in the Ecohydrology Research Group, has completed a successful two-month research exchange at Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel. The exchange was part of an ongoing research collaboration between the Ecohydrology Research Group at the University of Waterloo and the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering at Technion.

Philippe Van Cappellen and Kim Van Meter visited the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ in Leipzig on March 13-15. They held a series of high-level discussions to explore potential collaborations on the topic of coupled biogeochemistry-hydrology modelling. Central to the discussions were the challenges and opportunities in scale-dependent watershed modelling. A promising area of collaboration that emerged was the merging of biogeochemical functions into UFZ’s mesoscale hydrological model - stay tuned! 

The 2017 Director's review of the Earth and Environmental Sciences Area (EESA) took place on February 21-22. Philippe participated in the review as a member of the Expert Assessment Committee. The two days were filled with presentations of the science being carried out by EESA researchers, plus discussions with research staff.

Visit the EESA website for more information on their activities.

A new partnership has been established between Qatar University, United Arab Emirates University, and the University of Waterloo for a 3 year collaborative research project investigating the fate and transport of hydrocarbon pollutants in groundwater. The project is funded through the Qatar National Research Fund, which awarded a grant of $672,000 USD to University of Waterloo researchers.  Two of the researchers, who are the project leads for the UW team, are Ecohydrology Research Group members, Dr. Fereidoun Rezanezhad and Dr. Philippe Van Cappellen.