News

Canada Excellence Research Chairholders (CERC) from the Waterloo, Quebec City, Ottawa, Kingston, Calgary, Montreal, Hamilton, Toronto, Vancouver, Charlottetown, Edmonton, Sherbrooke, Winnipeg and Saskatoon met this week at the University of Waterloo to discuss recent advances within their research groups and goals for future research directions. This event marked the 5^th annual meeting of CERCs, chaired by Dr. Philippe Van Cappellen of the Ecohydrology Group (CERC in Ecohydrology) and Dr. David Cory (CERC in Quantum Information).

Taylor Maavara and Tariq Aziz, two PhD students in the Ecohydrology Research Group, were awarded CGU (Canada Geophysical Union) travel awards to present their research at the 2015 Joint Assembly (CGU-AGU-GAC-MAC) Conference in Montreal in May. Taylor will be presenting her research entitled, “A long-term sink for nutrient silicon in Canada’s most threatened river system”, and Tariq will be presenting on “Economic valuation of five water-related ecosystem services in the Grand River watershed”.  

The recent paper, Plastic debris in the Laurentian Great Lakes, published in the March Issue of the Journal of Great Lakes Research has received extensive media coverage this week by 570 News, CBC National News and Michigan Radio. Authors, Alex Driedger, Hans Durr, Kristen Mitchell and Philippe Van Cappellen have highlighted the lack of research and imminent hazard of plastic debris pollution in the Great Lakes.

Certain areas of the Great Lakes have suspended plastics concentrations as high as those found in the so-called garbage patches accumulating within large oceanic gyres.

Dr. Charles Vorosmarty, professor in the Department of Civil and 

A new article published this month in Journal of Great Lakes Research by graduate student Alex Driedger and Ecohydrology Research Group members Hans Dürr, Kristen Mitchell and Philippe Van Cappellen reviews the current state of knowledge of plastics pollution in the Laurentian Great Lakes.

Philippe gave a lecture to Third Age Learning – Guelph on March 4, as part of their seminar series “Planet Earth: How are we doing as Stewards?”. In his presentation, Philippe gave an overview of current and emerging global water issues. He stressed the importance of water not only for humans but also for healthy ecosystems. He reviewed a number of key concepts and principles, including water scarcity, water stress, environmental flows, ecosystem services and water pricing were reviewed.

Twenty-four graduate students and postdoctoral researchers attended the Reactive Transport Modeling I short course at University of Waterloo, from February 17 to February 27. The short course is part of the Training toward Environmentally Responsible Resource Extraction (TERRE) project supported through NSERC’s Collaborative Research and Training Experience (CREATE) program. Instructors of the course were Philippe Van Cappellen and Fereidoun Rezanezhad of the Ecohydrology Research Group.

A new article, On-Off Mobilization of Contaminants in Soils during Redox Oscillations, has been published in Environmental Science & Technology by Ecohydrology Group members Raoul-Marie Couture, Ekaterina Markelova and Chris Parsons in collaboration with Laurent Charlet (University of Grenoble) and Benoît Madé (National Radioactive Waste Management Agency, France).

Jolanta Kazmierczak successfully defended her PhD thesis entitled “Hydrogeology and Hydrochemistry of Groundwater-Dominated Lakes: From Catchment to the Groundwater-Lake Interface”, at the University of Copenhagen. Her supervisors were Peter Engesgaard, Bertil Nillson and Dieke Postma. As part of her graduate research, Jolanta spent 3 months in the Ecohydrology Research Group. Philippe was one of the external examiners at the thesis defence. Well done Jolanta!