News

Canadian wine is a $11 billion industry and has experienced substantial growth over the past decade. In the past, its success has hinged on grape growers and winemakers having a thorough understanding of the region’s climate, soil, and terrain because even small deviations can have detrimental impact on yield and quality. Now they must also consider climate change and its impact on vineyards.

Jessica Williamson, a doctoral student in the Department of Geography and Environmental Management, is researching the hydrological processes that affect grapevine development and success. 

A message from the Cheriton School of Computer Science.

GWF core team member and faculty leadProfessor Jimmy Lin has been named a 2022 ACM Fellow for his contributions to question answering, information retrieval, and natural language processing.

The Association for Computing Machinery is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, uniting computing educators, researchers and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources and address the field’s challenges. ACM fellowships are conferred to the top 1 percent of the association’s members, and the prestigious recognition indicates outstanding accomplishments in computing and information technology and outstanding service to ACM and the larger computing community.

Agricultural Water Futures has just released a new public-friendly report that provides a glimpse into the progress the project has made during the first phase of study (2017-2020).

Since the 1960s, eutrophication has been a critical problem in Lake Erie. High phosphorus concentrations in lake water are considered to be one of the major drivers that causes eutrophication leading to an overgrowth of algae. After the restriction of phosphorus use in household products, and upgrades of wastewater treatment plants, eutrophication was absent in the lake from 1980 to the mid-1990s.

Researchers have developed a new integrated model to evaluate the economic impacts of climate change on the Canadian Great Lakes Basin.

The Great Lakes are the largest freshwater system in the world. But factors like climate change, urbanization, and a growing population are increasing pressure on these valuable resources and may limit their availability for future generations. 

Scientists at the University of Waterloo’s Water Institute developed the new hydro-economic model to make the often unknown and invisible value of water more explicit.

The Global Water Futures Open Science Meeting typically provides an opportunity to come together to share, learn, plan and celebrate scientific achievements, building on progress and momentum of the program.

Food security is an urgent and growing concern for Indigenous populations in Canada. Environmental change in aquatic ecosystems can impact the health of fish and the communities that rely on those fish in many ways. Some of those ways can involve exposure to contaminants like mercury.

Warmer winters are leading to a greater frequency of freeze-thaw events and colder soils due to the loss of the insulating snowpack. These factors are subsequently changing the movement of water, carbon and nutrients in soils during the winter. Many assume that frozen soils are dormant. However, a new research project at the University of Waterloo is discovering that soils remain biogeochemically active during winter months, just differently from other seasons.