News

The Ontario Groundwater Geoscience 2024 Open House was held on February 27 (in-person) and February 29 (virtual). The full program can be obtained from the Ontario Geological Survey Open File Report 6406. Dr. Jovana Radosavljevic from the Ecohydrology Research Group (ERG) gave her presentation “Beyond Phosphorus: Salinization as a Driver of Eutrophication Symptoms in North American Lakes”.

A new paper published in the journal Applied Geochemistry relates data on lake water chemistry to land cover changes and road salt applications for Lake Wilcox located in Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada. The paper is co -authored by ERG members Jovana Radosavljevic, Stephanie Slowinski, Fereidoun Rezanezhad, Mahyar Shafii and Philippe Van Cappellen, alongside co-author Bahram Gharabaghi.

The Ecohydrology Research Group, in collaboration with the Wetland Soils & Greenhouse Gas Exchange Laband the Waterloo Wetland Laboratory, hosted another successful World Wetlands Day Research Symposium at the University of Waterloo on Friday February 2nd, 2024. This was the 12^th year that the University of Waterloo celebrated World Wetlands Day.

A new paper published in the journal Chemosphere presents the results of experiments looking at the interactions and competition between dissolved phosphorus and silicon (mostly found in the forms of the anions phosphate and silicate) during the precipitation of iron(III) oxyhydroxides as a result of iron(II) oxidation. The paper’s first author, Lu Huang, is a former ERG PhD student. Her co-authors are ERG members Chris T. Parsons, Stephanie Slowinski and Philippe Van Cappellen.

A new paper published in the journal Exploration presents a review of the current state of the literature on the catalytic degradation of microplastics. The review was co-authored by ERG members Erin Griffiths, Shuhuan Li, Fereidoun Rezanezhad and Philippe Van Cappellen alongside co-authors from the Department of Chemistry.

ERG group members gathered for our annual holiday party! Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!

The week of December 11-15, 2023, Ecohydrology Research Group members presented their research at the 2023 AGU Fall Meeting. This annual conference is being held as a hybrid event, with the in-person session being held in San Francisco. With nearly 24,000 attendees, the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting is the largest Earth and space science meeting in the world.

Katie Hettinga, a first year MSc student in ERG, won first place for her talk at the Cold Regions Research Centre Days Conference 2023. Her project focuses on CO₂ dynamics in the winter, or non-growing season, across Canadian peatlands, how these dynamics function relative to the growing season, and what they mean for annual CO₂ budgets.

Ecohydrology group PhD student Bowen Zhou successfully defended his thesis on Wednesday, December 6, 2023 via a hybrid defence. Bowen’s thesis is titled "Modelling effects of stormwater best management practices on urban stormwater runoff phosphorus." 

Following the recent publication of an article in The Conversation about the threat of applying road salt to roads in the winter to water quality in both groundwater and lakes, Philippe has given a number of interviews about the recent work about salinization to various CBC stations.