News

The Water Institute has published a new article on Dr. Rooney's contributions to microplastic research, highlighting the risks that microplastics pose to the Laurentian Great Lakes.

While evidence of concern is quickly mounting, there is still a lot of uncertainty. We cannot yet say how much pollution is too much, or what monitoring thresholds and alerts should be. We also have not collectively agreed on the best monitoring approach, explained Rooney, “but the efforts of the Microplastics Work Group took us a big step closer to this for the Great Lakes.”

On November 9, 2022, the Waterloo Wetland Lab led a team of volunteers in a wetland cleanup event with the intention of emphasizing the importance of urban wetlands. The wetland, located near Fischer-Hallman Road and Columbia Street in Waterloo is one of WWL member, Claire Schon's, research sites.

Post-doc opportunity in conservation biology: species at risk (SAR) & invasive species in a Priority Place

Rooney Lab defends their title as door decorating champions in 2017 against fierce competition!

This year our design traced the environmental drivers (namely pumpkin spice pollution) leading to the increased expression of the XMAS gene and resulting increase in Christmas Morph relative abundance in the fir tree population.  As you'd expect, there were bottom-up effects on the squirrel population.  Very scientific.

A new paper by Rooney Lab PhD student, Courtney Robichaud, was just published in the Journal for Great Lakes Research!  This article explores some of the more subtle effects of invasion by Phragmites australis on the wetland bird community.  Through a comparison with a study done in 2001/02, her work suggests that a time lag exists between the initial invasion and the realization of some of these effects. You can access it free at this link until July 8th, 2017.    

Abstract:

Released today, Dr. Rooney and colleagues Dr. Robinson and Dr. Petrone from the University of Waterloo have a comment piece in Nature Climate Change detailing their framework for integrating reclamation planning for megaprojects at the landscape scale with future climate change projections. Reconciling reclamation plans with climate change is necessary to give us our best hope at achieving self-sustaining reclamation targets.

Read more here