News

Congratulations to Tatjana Milojevic and Kassandra Ma of the Ecohydrology Research Group: each student received an ISEB Discovery Award from the International Society for Environmental Biogeochemistry (ISEB). The awards will allow Tatjana and Kassandra to attend ISEB’s Short Course and Research Colloquium on “Interfacial Phenomena in Environmental Biogeochemistry”, which will be held next month in Cancun, Mexico.

In a set of two companion papers published in the Journal of Marine Systems, Helen Powley and Philippe Van Cappellen of the Ecohydrology Research Group, and their collaborators Mike Krom (University of Leeds) and Kay-Christian Emeis (University of Hamburg), explore the unique biogeochemistry of the Eastern Mediterranean Sea (EMS). In their first paper, they develop and calibrate a dynamic mass balance model for the coupled cycles of phosphorus (P) and nitrogen (N) in the EMS.

Fereidoun Rezanezhad has been selected to serve as the Head of Canadian National Representatives to the IAHS Commission for Water Quality by the Canadian National Committee for IAHS. Congratulations! 

Fereidoun Rezanezhad attended the Complex Soil Systems Conference: “A Path to Improved Understanding of Complex Soil Systems”, held on September 3-5, 2014 in Berkeley, California.  Fereidoun’s oral presentation was entitled “Peat: A complex soil with dual-porosity media” with co-author Philippe Van Cappellen.

A new publication by PhD student Taylor Maavara and her co-authors Hans Dürr and Philippe Van Cappellen in Global Biogeochemical Cycles estimates the worldwide retention of the nutrient element silicon (Si) by river damming. The authors present a new approach that combines the small data set on Si budgets for dam reservoirs with biogeochemical modeling and statistical analysis. They show that on average dams retain about 20% of the river inflow of Si into reservoirs, or 22.3x10¹² g SiO2 per year globally.

An article in the Huffington Post today (www.huffingtonpost.ca/2014/07/10/plastic-pollution-oceans-litter_n_5573944.html) highlights the ubiquity of plastic debris and includes comments from Philippe Van Cappellen on the nature of the problem and what we are finding in the Great Lakes.

The article also includes the infographic below explaining a common pathway for litter to reach waterways. 

The Goldschmidt 2014 Conference took place June 8-13 in Sacramento, California. Philippe Van Cappellen and David O’Connell were in attendance. Philippe presented a keynote entitled “Biogeochemical Model Complexity, There and Back Again” with co-authors Taylor Maavara, Severin Stojanovic and Hans Dürr. David’s oral presentation was entitled “Phosphorus Retention in Sediments of an Artificially Fertilized Boreal Lake” with co-authors Nienke Ansems, Diane Orihel, Johan Wiklund, Thilo Behrends, Hannah Chessel, David Schindler and Philippe Van Cappellen.