Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

More than half of the global population now resides in cities, with projections indicating that this percentage is set to rise further. Canada's population is more than 75% urban, and is home to several fast growing metropolises. Urbanization results in a range of water quality problems that make water supplies more expensive to treat for drinking, and reduce the opportunities for recreation and enjoyment of water bodies. Watershed models are critical tools for managing water resources. Watershed models represent the role of weather and the landscape in the generation of runoff and streamflow, and the role of water in washing pollutants into streams. Watershed models allow planners and managers to ask `what-if' questions about climate, land use planning, and watershed management, and a watershed model can estimate how these factors all interact to affect runoff and pollution. Urban watershed models have been focused on representing infrastructure, and do not adequately represent the interaction of infrastructure with the environment. This research is focused on improving three important aspects of urban watershed models, including the role of soils in generating runoff and pollution, the subsurface in storing and slowly releasing runoff and pollutants, and downstream transportation of pollutants far from their origin. This research is focused on new ways of making watershed models by combining big datasets, machine learning and artificial intelligence, and more traditional watershed models. The significance of this research lies in its potential to guide urban expansion in a way that protects ecosystem services, particularly water quality. The findings from this research will enhance our predictive understanding of how the details of land use and climate change interact with water management in, and downstream from, urban areas. This in turn will allow for better decisions about how the urban growth Canada is expected to undergo in the near future can take place with minimal impact on our water quality.