World Wetlands Day 2026

14th Annual World Wetlands Day at the University of Waterloo

About World Wetlands Day

World Wetlands Day (WWD) is celebrated each year on February 2nd, which marks the day when the Convention on Wetlands was adopted in 1971 in Ramsar, Iran. The Convention is an international government agreement acknowledging the importance of wetlands and plays a central role in the wise use and conservation of these critical ecosystems. To learn more about the Convention, visit: www.ramsar.org

World Wetlands Day 2026 Registration

The University of Waterloo’s WWD event will be held in person in the Centre for Environmental and Information Technology (EIT) building on campus on Monday, February 2nd, 2026.

The event will feature a poster session and reception on the first and second floors from 4:00 to 6:00 pm, followed by a distinguished lecture by Dr. Sarah Finkelstein in EIT 1015 from 6:00 to 7:00 pm, entitled:

"From Biidasige Park in the Toronto Port Lands to the Winisk River on Ontario’s North Coast: linking paleoenvironmental research and Indigenous knowledge to support wetland conservation in Ontario"

"From Biidasige Park in the Toronto Port Lands to the Winisk River on Ontario’s North Coast: linking paleoenvironmental research and Indigenous knowledge to support wetland conservation in Ontario"

Ontario contains one of the most extensive and diverse profiles of wetland types in any jurisdiction of the world. These wetlands hold deep cultural significance for Indigenous communities, provide essential habitat for threatened wildlife, support flood mitigation and water quality, and play a critical role in biogeochemical cycling including carbon sequestration. The thick soil profiles that accumulate as a result of waterlogged conditions in wetland contexts can also preserve detailed archives of the wetland initiation and developmental history. Through the techniques of paleoecology, biological and geochemical tracers preserved in these wetland soils can be used to track changes over decades to millennia, thus providing valuable insights into drivers of change and resilience to disturbance. In the Toronto Port Lands, buried soils were uncovered during construction for a massive floodplain protection project, yielding pollen and seed assemblages, and radiocarbon dates detailing pre- and early-settlement era wetland plant communities. Used in combination with Anishinaabe knowledge of plants and their uses, these results inform restoration of what was an extensive freshwater wetland at Waasayishkodenayosh, the mouth of Toronto’s Don River. In other examples, we are working in collaboration with Weenusk and Moose Cree First Nations to use paleoecology to identify hotspots of peat carbon accumulation, track pathways of peatland development and impacts of climate change across the inland peatlands of the Hudson Bay Lowlands, and the coastal mineral soil wetlands proximal to Weeneebeg (James Bay) and Washaybeyoh (Hudson Bay). In combination with Indigenous knowledge, these results are used to support land use planning and the conservation vision of these communities.

Sarah Finkelstein is a Professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Toronto. She is a paleoecologist and paleoclimatologist with research interests in Holocene and Late Pleistocene wetland development, carbon cycling in wetlands, and using palynology (pollen) and other microfossil proxies to reconstruct long-term environmental changes. Sarah is also engaged in collaborations with Indigenous knowledge keepers to link scientific and Indigenous knowledge in support of climate change mitigation, conservation and wetland restoration. Sarah’s research has focused on the diverse wetlands of the Great Lakes region in Southern Ontario as well as the ecosystems of Arctic and Boreal Canada including the extensive peatlands of the Hudson and James Bay Lowlands.