Canada Excellence Research Chair redefines environmental research

Earth’s water resources are increasingly threatened by overuse and environmental stresses, such as pollutants, invasive species and climate change.

Canada Excellence Research Chair Philippe Van Cappellen, a professor of earth and environmental sciences in the Faculty of Science, is tackling these issues with a unique research program that covers spatial scales, from the molecular level, via regional watershed processes to global environmental impacts.

“The environment is interconnected and multidimensional, and our research should be too,” says Van Cappellen.

Van Cappellen’s Ecohydrology Research Group includes more than 30 scientists who combine laboratory experiments, field sampling and mathematical modelling to identify, monitor and predict the fate of nutrients and harmful chemicals along the water cycle.

Currently more than 100 million people rely on arsenic contaminated groundwater for their drinking water supply, and the risk of exposure is rising. Van Cappellen’s team is researching the chemical forms of arsenic under variable environmental conditions. This is one example of how detailed investigations can have wide-ranging implications for water resources.

“Our research has highlighted the strong role sulphur can play in controlling the mobility and toxicity of arsenic in the subsurface,” says Van Cappellen. “Our results not only help us better predict which groundwaters are most susceptible to arsenic contamination, but also to propose new remediation approaches.”

In another project, Van Cappellen and his international colleagues are assessing how population growth, climate change, urbanization and wastewater management are changing the supply of the limiting nutrients to the unique and vulnerable ecosystems of the Mediterranean Sea.

“A key challenge in assessing global-scale environmental impacts is often the scarcity of data,” says Van Cappellen.

For example, there are currently more than 70,000 dams in the world. Together, they represent one of the major modifications by humans of the natural cycles of water and nutrients. Yet, we only have data on nutrient retention by river dams for a handful of reservoirs worldwide.

To overcome the lack of monitoring data, Van Cappellen’s Ecohydrology Research Group is developing a new approach that combines statistical analyses with mathematical modeling to calculate the global amounts of nutrients that accumulate behind dams.

The results imply that river damming is dramatically changing the absolute and relative fluxes of nutrients in rivers and the world’s coastal zone, with far-reaching consequences from individual aquatic ecosystems to the global biosphere.

For more information about additional projects led by Van Cappellen and the Ecohydrology Research Group, please visit please visit the Ecohydrology Research Group website.