Research

Our research aims to understand stressors affecting water security and provide adaptation and mitigation options to address them using principles of sustainability science. This includes place-based, and transdisciplinary partnerships. Our research centers on eutrophication (ecosystem change driven by increased nutrient loading, leading to more algae production) and cyanobacterial harmful algal blooms (cHABs), a common consequence of eutrophication. These problems are widely considered the most significant global threats to freshwater quality. Our work spans wetland management and drainage (intricately related to water quality), climate change, and human dimensions of agri-environmental and water quality decisions.

Understanding nutrient and cyanobacterial bloom dynamics

Cyanobacterial HABs can impact water security via their effects on ecosystem health and risks associated with toxins that harm human and animal health. These blooms are widespread, but their risks remain poorly characterized, and solutions to cHABs have been elusive. Our work on blooms includes understanding toxin risk, and management options for mitigating bloom risk, including a novel dual whole-lake experiment underway with colleagues at IISD-ELA.

Climate, changing climate, and winter conditions affecting biogeochemical cycles and water quality

Rapid changes in climate, including the duration of ice cover, create the risk of threshold changes in ecosystems. Yet critical gaps in knowledge of the ecology and biogeochemistry of lakes beneath the ice limit our ability to predict change. And, other climate effects are nonstationary, and place based. Our work helps inform our understanding of change with a focus on understanding biogeochemical processes, their controls, and how they will change with changing climate.

Agricultural landscapes, ecosystem services, and water quality

Many remedies for eutrophication lie on land via interventions that alter management of agricultural systems. We work to advance our process-based understanding of nutrient transport, including model representation, and generating science to inform pivotal decisions, such as the choice of Beneficial Management Practices (BMPs). This is our most active area of work and includes efforts to understand solutions on land that can help support improved water quality, without sacrificing agricultural productivity. We are committed to outreach on water quality and have created the Agricultural Nutrients and Water Quality website that details some of our ongoing work and advice for water quality solutions.

Wetlands, wetland management and drainage

Rapid change is underway on the prairies. The changing hydrology and climate, as well as rapid developments in agricultural practices, have fuelled widespread wetland drainage, most notably in Saskatchewan where changes in regulation are expected to approve widespread drainage to aid agricultural production. Our work aims to inform the role of wetlands in the landscape, and has helped understand socioeconomic factors driving wetland loss, alongside societal costs associated with wetland drainage.

Changing sourcewater quality and adaptation for drinking water

We work extensively with a water treatment plant in southern Saskatchewan, the Buffalo Pound Water Treatment Plant, supporting varied needs to understand drivers of change. We run a long-term monitoring program using sensors – following water quality through summer months and streaming that data for the water treatment plant to help adapt their processes. Our work on this lake is diverse, driven by the needs of the plant and our scientific interest, including recent and ongoing work on changing flow source and impacts on water quality, winter changes in water quality, and many other efforts informed by our sensor-based monitoring, and long-term chemical monitoring of the system.

Greenhouse gas emissions

Helen's PhD work focussed on aquatic GHG emissions, and this remains an area of interest for her – understanding natural and anthropogenic impacts on GHG fluxes in aquatic environments, and more recently some work in terrestrial environments.