News

Steph Slowinski, Research Biogeochemist in ERG, attended the third session of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee to develop an international legally binding instrument on plastic pollution, including in the marine environment (INC-3), in Nairobi, Kenya at the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Headquarters on 13-19 November.

Philippe presented the plenary keynote presentation entitled “The Environmental Biogeochemistry of Phosphorus: A tale of too little or too much” at the 12^th National Conference on Environmental Chemistry (NCEC) held on November 17-21, 2023, in Wuhan, China.

Philippe visited China University of Geosciences (CUG) in Wuhan China on November 13-17. The visit included in-depth discussions on collaborations between Waterloo’s Ecohydrology Research Group (ERG) and CUG’s Environmental Hydrogeology Group (EHG). 

The Ecohydrology Research Group met with the City of Kitchener’s Sanitary and Stormwater Utilities Department to provide updates on two NSERC Alliance funded projects in which the City is a partner. 

Members of the Ecohydrology Research Group volunteered to facilitate kids’ science activities at the University of Waterloo’s Science Open House on Saturday, October 28^th. Over 4,000 people attended the Science Open House and Gem and Mineral show this year!

The Second Joint Symposium of the International Societies for Environmental Biogeochemistry and Subsurface Microbiology was held in Banff on 22-28 October. Philippe Van Cappellen, Jovana Radosavljevic, and Erin Griffiths attended.

A new paper published in Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences presents the results of analyses of two sediment cores from Lake Wilcox, a kettle lake located in the greater Toronto area. The results give insight on the impacts of land use/land cover changes on lake P biogeochemistry, and into the impact of road salt-caused salinization on lake ecosystems. 

The second annual meeting of the Microplastics Fingerprinting project was held as a 2-day meeting from September 18^th - 19^th at the CIGI campus in uptown Waterloo. The aim of the workshop was to review the progress of the work completed over the last 2 years, and exchange ideas about further integration among the different work packages, while deepening collaborations with our external partners.

Philippe participated in a panel discussion entitled, "Protecting the Grand River: Microplastics and environmental stewardship in the Haldimand Tract," organized by Environmental Defence. Besides Philippe, the panel included Courtney Skye of the Six Nations of the Grand River, who is also the founder of Protect the Tract, and Karen Wirsig of Environmental Defence moderating the discussion.

Ecohydrology group MSc student Jane Ye successfully defended her thesis on September 7, 2023 in a virtual defence. Jane's thesis is titled "The Influence of Soil Moisture, Oxygen, and Temperature on Naphthalene Biodegradation and CO₂ and CH₄ effluxes." Her research was supported by the NSERC Collaborative Research and Development Grant, and Imperial Oil Limited. Jane was supervised by Drs. Fereidoun Rezanezhad and Philippe Van Cappellen (both from Earth and Environmental Sciences), and the committee included Drs.