News

Philippe was part of the Canadian delegation to the on-site review of the (international) research training group (RTG) 1829 "Integrated Hydrosystem Modelling" (PI: Olaf Cirpka), conducted by the German Science Foundation (DFG) on January 26-27. The Universities of Tübingen, Stuttgart and Hohenheim participate in the RTG, with University of Waterloo as the main international partner. The other Canadian delegates included Ed Sudicky, Dave Rudolph and Nandita Basu. For more information on the RTG, visit

Hans Dürr is quoted in Water Canada's news article, which discusses plastic pollution in marine environments and reports that US President Barack Obama has signed a bill prohibiting the manufacture or use of microbeads in personal care products in the United States.

Hans noted that in some parts of the Great Lakes, our lab has found 500,000 pieces of plastic per square kilometer.

The Canadian government is also developing regulations that will prohibit the manufacture and sale of personal care products containing microbeads. 

This week, Ecohydrology Group Members are presenting their research at the 2015 AGU Fall Meeting (December 14-18, 2015) in San Francisco. With nearly 24,000 attendees, AGU Fall Meeting is the largest Earth and space science meeting in the world.

Fereidoun Rezanezhad and Geertje Pronk from the Ecohydrology Research Group organized a session entitled “Response of Terrestrial Ecosystems Biogeochemistry to Dynamic Hydrological and Climatic Drivers” with 8 oral and 26 poster presentations.

Presentations by Ecohydrology Group Members:

A new paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences presents the first geographically explicit and predictive modeling of the impact of river damming on the biogeochemical cycle of the nutrient element phosphorus.

Philippe Van Cappellen has been elected to the office of Vice-President/President-Elect of the International Society for Environmental Biogeochemistry, ISEB (http://www.isebiogeochemistry.com). His terms will begin officially on January 1,2016. At that date, the present President of ISEB, Grant Ferris of the University of Toronto, will be replaced by the incoming President, Jerzy Weber.

A new publication by Ecohydrology researchers Philippe Van Cappellen and Raoul Couture and Spanish colleagues explores the fate of trace metals and sulfur in sediments of a reservoir lake impacted by acid mine drainage. The modeling study shows that the sediments act as a net sink for the pollutants, however, it will require cessation of the inflow of acid mine drainage to significantly improve water quality in the reservoir. DOI:10.1016/j.chemgeo.2015.10.023

PhD Candidate, Ekaterina Markelova wins a student prize for the Best Oral Presentation at the 3rd Annual Workshop on Antimony in the Environment in Leipzig. Her talk was entitled, 'The contrasting redox behavior of Sb and As in soil and argillaceous environments'. Congratulations, Ekaterina! 

Philippe Van Cappellen was named a Distinguished Research Fellow in the Sino-Canadian Research Centre on Plateau Lakes at Yunnan University (YNU).  The announcement was made during the unveiling of the plaque for the Centre, which was attended by YNU’s leadership and the Ambassador and Consul General of Canada in China. The Centre is a result of the 1^st Sino-Canadian Workshop on Plateau Lakes Research Plateau held in Kunming this past July.