Yesterday was World Fisheries Day! In that spirit, Celeste Digiovanni, a PhD student in Environmental Geography studying marine governance in Canada wrote a post inspired from the point of view of an iconic species, the sockeye. My eyes opened. There were thousands of others like me. I saw some emerging from their little jelly-like sacks amongst the gravel. I felt the cold, tasteless water on my scales for the first time. I gasped for my first breath and found it- was I alive? We started flapping our bits around and found rhythm, some of us more coordinated than others. I started to navigate this new underwater world beyond the sack that once confined me; slowly leaving, back to the gravel. New life. We swam around the river as light turned into dark. We fed on the zooplankton that we could find. We outgrew our river, and as those before us, ventured into a much saltier and colder world. We encountered others that resembled us throughout our journey. Some were trapped in nets, but a ...

In case you missed it, this past Sunday (August 10th) was International Biodiesel day, in honour of this momentous occasion I thought I would dive into the pros and cons of this alternative fuel source. Fossil fuels (such as natural gas, coal and petroleum) are pouches of organic matter which have been pressurized and decomposed over long periods of time. In contrast, biofuels are made from live organic matter (ranging from canola, maize, sunflowers, animal fats and soy). Thus they provide a more sustainable alternative to the material depletion associated with traditional fossil fuels while performing in many of the same ways. As the cost for fossil fuels continue to rise, part of the appeal of alternative fuels sources is their potentially low production cost. We should also consider the environmental impact of growing crops for fuels, CO2 (of of the greenhouse gases released through the combustion of fuel) is taken up by the crops. In other words, biofuels can provide a carbo...

A little while ago I was working at an information table for sustainability and so I had to gather information about the cool research we do here on campus. I asked a whole lot of uOttawa professors about their research regarding sustainable development, and I thought that the coolest out of all of them was that of Professor Robert Delatolla’s. What is so incredibly neat about Professor Delatolla’s research is that he uses miniature spaceships. Sold yet? These honeycomb pasta like plastic thingies are mini-houses for bacteria that clean waste water. MBBRs (Moving Bed Biofilm Reactors – BUT FEAR NOT: you won’t need to remember this) are little bits of plastic that are designed to allow bacteria to grow in a community called a biofilm. These biofilms, or bacterial communities, filter the sludge in water by removing ammonia and nitrates. There are a couple of reasons why I think this particular project is brilliant. We are using what bacteria use against us against them – muahah...

When I was a student at the University of Ottawa I spent a lot of my time droning over the courses available in my program. The environment was my thing so I would sit and endlessly read course descriptions in the hopes of finding content that would jump out at me. Imagine how happy I was when I completed my course table full of geeky environmental courses. Now imagine how unhappy I was when I found out that sometimes the profs of those courses didn't share the.... enthusiasm I did for the subject matter. I don't mean to diminish in any way the capacity of those professors to teach, I just think that my expectations were unrealistically high because of all the searching I had done. I was hoping so hard that the professors would be as geeky about the environment as I was. Of course the real problem is that not every prof (in my case) would have been an environmental specialist. In the end the course wasn't the problem, what I really needed to know was the interests ...

From the humble beginnings of researchers working out of dilapidated trailers, using plywood and tarps to keep the rain off, to the emergence of a modest but highly sophisticated research facility; the Experimental Lakes Area (ELA) has transformed our knowledge of freshwater ecosystems, and produced an impressive body of research; the depth and completeness of which cannot be found elsewhere in the world. Since its creation in 1968 the ELA has faced funding cuts 3 times, previous to the government's most recent cut in the now infamous omnibus bill C-38. The ELAs research has contributed substantially to our understanding of managing algal blooms, acid rain, climate change, mercury pollution, greenhouse gas fluxes from hydroelectric reservoirs, and endocrine-disrupting chemicals. Dr. Schindler , a renowned scientist in his field was on campus recently, speaking to the importance of preserving this essential research body. Disruptions to funding and research, he argued, compr...