Grant: Canada Excellence Research Chairs

The availability and quality of freshwater not only impact human health and well-being, but also the functioning of essential ecosystems, including rivers, wetlands, lakes and estuaries. The great utility of water has also proven its undoing, as the sustainability of freshwater resources is threatened worldwide by over-usage and other stresses. There is thus an urgent need to establish new ways to manage our limited water resources. Most available freshwater is present as groundwater. Exchanges between groundwater and surface water occur throughout the landscape and they support a plethora of key ecosystem services. The proposed CERC research program is a multidisciplinary effort dedicated to establishing an improved and quantitative understanding of the relationships between groundwater management alternatives and the consequences for aquatic ecosystems health. The program will have a particular focus on the fluxes of nutrients and heavy metals across interfaces separating groundwater from surface waters. The research will combine laboratory and field experiments and mathematical modeling. The experiments and field measurements will assess the rates, mechanisms and products of biogeochemical transformations under the dynamic environmental conditions that commonly prevail in groundwater?surface water mixing zones.