News

A new article published this month in Journal of Great Lakes Research by graduate student Alex Driedger and Ecohydrology Research Group members Hans Dürr, Kristen Mitchell and Philippe Van Cappellen reviews the current state of knowledge of plastics pollution in the Laurentian Great Lakes.

Philippe gave a lecture to Third Age Learning – Guelph on March 4, as part of their seminar series “Planet Earth: How are we doing as Stewards?”. In his presentation, Philippe gave an overview of current and emerging global water issues. He stressed the importance of water not only for humans but also for healthy ecosystems. He reviewed a number of key concepts and principles, including water scarcity, water stress, environmental flows, ecosystem services and water pricing were reviewed.

Twenty-four graduate students and postdoctoral researchers attended the Reactive Transport Modeling I short course at University of Waterloo, from February 17 to February 27. The short course is part of the Training toward Environmentally Responsible Resource Extraction (TERRE) project supported through NSERC’s Collaborative Research and Training Experience (CREATE) program. Instructors of the course were Philippe Van Cappellen and Fereidoun Rezanezhad of the Ecohydrology Research Group.

A new article, On-Off Mobilization of Contaminants in Soils during Redox Oscillations, has been published in Environmental Science & Technology by Ecohydrology Group members Raoul-Marie Couture, Ekaterina Markelova and Chris Parsons in collaboration with Laurent Charlet (University of Grenoble) and Benoît Madé (National Radioactive Waste Management Agency, France).

Jolanta Kazmierczak successfully defended her PhD thesis entitled “Hydrogeology and Hydrochemistry of Groundwater-Dominated Lakes: From Catchment to the Groundwater-Lake Interface”, at the University of Copenhagen. Her supervisors were Peter Engesgaard, Bertil Nillson and Dieke Postma. As part of her graduate research, Jolanta spent 3 months in the Ecohydrology Research Group. Philippe was one of the external examiners at the thesis defence. Well done Jolanta!

A new review paper, Submarine groundwater discharge from tropical islands, has been published in Grundwasser by Hans Dürr in collaboration with international colleagues Dr. Nils Moosdorf (University of Hamburg), Dr. Thomas Stieglitz (Bernstein Center Freiburg), Dr. Hannelore Waska (University of Oldenburg) and Dr. Jens Hartmann (University of Hamburg).

Welcome to our new Coordinator, Maren Pauly.

As of today, Maren Pauly is assuming the role of Coordinator of our research group. Maren is replacing Erin Jones, who will be on parental leave until next October. Maren has a degree in Environmental Science. She plans to return to graduate school next fall, but in the mean time will provide much needed support to the group. Welcome Maren!

The 2015 Science Innovation Award is named after the late Prof. Werner Stumm, who was Philippe's postdoctoral advisor at the Swiss Institute for Aquatic Sciences in the early 1990s.

The Ecohydrology Research group is organizing the four sessions listed below at the 2015 Joint Assembly of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). The conference will be held May 3–7 2015 in Montreal, Canada. 

We encourage you to submit an abstract to these sessions. The deadline for abstract submission is January 14, 2015. 

Philippe Van Cappellen, Abdus Sabur, Tatjana Milojevic and Kassandra Ma of the Ecohydrology Research Group attended the International Society for Environmental Biogeochemistry (ISEB) Short Course on Interfacial Phenomena in Biogeochemistry, held 16-20 November in Cancún, Mexico. As part of the short course, Philippe gave a lecture entitled “Soil Respiration – Bioenergetic Musings”. Tatjana and Kassandra played hosts during a world café centered on future directions for biofilm research. Overall this was an exciting and instructive week, together with old and new friends.