A number of new students are joining our research team this May. One of them, Ian Evans has recently been awarded a Special Graduate Entrance Award. Ian completely his undergraduate degree in April, which included a senior honours thesis titled “A review and application of the Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE) for future integration in agent-based models of land-use and land-cover change (ABMs/LUCC)”. The level of detail and independent study performed by Ian in this senior honours thesis was unprecedented and we look forward to continuing the development of RUSLE into an agent-based modelling primitive for plug and play use in land-use and land-cover change models. Ian joins our Sustainable Wetlands Habitat research project to quantify the spatial configuration and pattern of habitat types, typography, and other wetland features in undisturbed areas. The goal is to use these data in a reference condition approach to quantify the characteristics of reference landscapes and use our results to create design criteria for wetland reclamation efforts. The project combines researchers at Waterloo (Dr. Rebecca Rooney, Hans Durr) with others at Western (Dr. Irena Creed) and the University of Alberta (Dr. Suzanne Bayley) and includes a range of departments that include biology, ecohydrology and biogeochemistry, and geography, among others. Congratulations to Ian and welcome to the team! If you’re reading this and you’re interested in this project as part of PhD or Masters then please send me (Derek Robinson) an email.