News

On August 29^th, the Honourable Randy Boissonnault, Minister of Employment, Workforce Development and Official Languages, on behalf of the Honourable François-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, and of the Honourable Mark Holland, Minister of Health, announced support for over 4,700 researchers and research projects across Canada.

A three-day workshop on sustainable agriculture in a net-zero economy was held on the Grenfell campus of Memorial University in Newfoundland (MUN). The workshop was organized by Dr. Christina Smeaton, a former ERG Research Associate now an Assistant Professor at MUN. The workshop was attended by about 20 participants, including ERG members Philippe Van Cappellen, Fereidoun Rezanezhad and Saraswati Saraswati.

Ecohydrology group PhD student Jovana Radosavljevic successfully defended her thesis on August 17, 2023 in a hybrid defence. Jovana's thesis is titled "Land use changes and salinization: Impacts on lake phosphorus cycling and water quality." Her research was supported by the Global Water Futures Program. Jovana's examination committee included her supervisors, Drs. Fereidoun Rezanezhad and Philippe Van Cappellen (both from Earth and Environmental Sciences), her advisory committee members, Drs.

The 2023 International Workshop on Surface-Earth System Science was held on August 7-9 at Tianjin University in Tianjin, China. The general theme of the workshop was Advancing Earth System Science and Promoting Interdisciplinary Research.  Philippe gave his online talk on Lake Eutrophication – Recent Advances and Emerging Challenges in the topical session on Processes of Earth System and the Eco-environmental Impacts (Topic 2).

A new paper published in the journal Ecological Informatics presents a long-term annual total P (TP) budget for the Lake St. Clair–Lake Erie system, averaged over a 14-year period, from 2003 to 2016. The paper is authored by ERG members Serghei Bocaniov and Philippe Van Cappellen, together with Don Scavia from the University of Michigan. The results show that the TP output from the system substantially exceeds the sum of the external TP inputs, hence implying a major role of in-lake P mobilization processes.

A new paper published in the journal Sustainability presents the values of three ecosystem services – water filtration, nutrient cycling, and carbon sequestration – in the Grand River watershed of southern Ontario, Canada. The paper’s first author, Tariq Aziz, is a former ERG PhD student. His co-authors are Alian-Désiré Nimubona from the Department of Economics at Waterloo and Philippe Van Cappellen.

The week of July 9^th- 14^th 2023, Ecohydrology Research Group members present their research at the Goldschmidt 2023 conference in Lyon, France.

In a series of two papers, Kunfu Pi, a former ERG postdoctoral fellow, and his colleagues explore the regional and depth-dependent distributions and chemical speciation of the micronutrient selenium (Se) in organic-rich soils of NE China known as mollisols. The results highlight that fluvial transport and deposition, as well as land use change, are the main drivers of the spatial variability and speciation of Se in the mollisols.

On June 22, ERG PhD students Jovana Radosavljevic and Bowen Zhou were invited to present seminars about their research at the Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) Science & Technology Branch under the Water Science and Technology Directorate Seminar Series. The seminar series is hosted by Watershed Hydrology and Ecology Research Division (WHERD) at the Canada Centre for Inland Waters (CCIW), Burlington, ON, one of the world’s leading freshwater research centers.

From June 6^th to 9^th the Waterloo-Wellington Children’s Groundwater Festival took place at the Guelph Lake Conservation Area. The festival aims to help educate children on the importance and diversity of water use in historical and modern times. This year they hosted over 500 attendees and brought together over 125 volunteers in the field to help educate the students. ERG members, Christina Lam, Jane Ye, Danielle Green, Xiaochuang Bu, Qiwei Huang, Lewis Alcott, and Katie Hettinga all volunteered to help with festival activities.