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- 2023 Archives
- Scientists dig deep and find a way to accurately predict snowmelt after droughts
- Cracking the Case of Missing Snowmelt After Drought
- 2023 Esri Canada GIS Scholarship for SFU
- Thesis Defence - Congratulations to Daniel Murphy
- Thesis Defence - Congratulations to Kyle Kusack
- Thesis Defence - Congratulations to Matthew Taylor
- Anke Baker Wins Staff Achievement Award
- Spring 2023 Virtual Geospeaker Event with Ginger Gosnell-Myers
- CAG Paper Presentation Award - Congratulations to Alysha van Duynhoven!
- Informing & Engaging Urban Youth on Public Hearings: GEOG 363 Final Showcase
- Research Talk: Modeling Urban Wetland Complexities
- Highlight Paper: Quantifying land carbon cycle feedbacks under negative CO2 emissions
- Bright Addae winner of the 2023 SFU ECCE GIS Scholarship Award
- Thesis Defence - Congratulations to Jonny Cripps
- Thesis Defence - Congratulations to Diandra Oliver
- 2023 Geospeaker Presentation with Dr. Pauline McGuirk
- Congratulations to Our Graduates - October 2023
- Evaluating the impact of educational goals at SFU
- The Belongings of Precariously Housed People - A Report
- Thesis Defence - Congratulations to Takuma Mihara
- Thesis Defence - Congratulations to Adrienne Arbor
- Thesis Defence - Congratulations to Claire Shapton
- 2023 Distinguished Speaker Presentation with Dr. Deb Cowen
- Cheers to Paul Degrace and his well-earned retirement!
- 2024 Archives
- Professor Nicholas Blomley Honored with the Community-Engaged Research Achievement Award
- Graduate Students Claire Shapton and Marina Chavez Honored with the Community-Engaged Graduate Scholar Award
- Applications now open: 2024 ESRI Canada GIS Scholarship for SFU
- Associate Professor Rosemary Collard achieves 13th place on SFU Altmetric List
- The PEAK feature: GSU hosts inaugural RANGE conference
- Gabrielle Wong wins First Prize in 2023 Student Learning Commons Writing Contest
- Gabrielle Wong receives Warren Gill Memorial Award
- Professor Nick Blomley receives Warren Gill Memorial Award for Community Impact
- Geography Student Union recipient of the FENV 2024 Changemaker Awards
- Senior Lecturer Tara Holland reveals the secret sauce of great teaching
- Hallway Screens Slides
- 2023 Archives
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New Faculty Spotlight
Drive around in the mountains most anywhere in western North America and you’re certain to encounter road cuts: dynamited faces where the highway department has sliced open a hillslope, exposing soil, bedrock, and—if you slow down and look closely (with someone else at the wheel of course)—networks of roots that wind their way along fractures in the rock. The trees up above are going deep to find nutrients and water. It turns out that how the bedrock inside hillslopes breaks apart over millions of years determines just how much water can be stored for the overlying trees during dry periods. And this is important: differences in water storage in bedrock can have dramatic consequences for why different kinds of forests are where they are, and how they are responding to environmental change. Yet, unlike the soil, shallow bedrock properties remain unmapped across most of Earth’s terrestrial surface: an exciting research frontier that is well suited for a new group in the Department of Geography.
Most of my life as a researcher has been spent tromping around California, exploring diverse plant ecosystems, ranging from crisp-dry oak savannas to dripping-wet rainforests, and drilling to monitor how water moves in the bedrock beneath. I try to track the fate of water from when it falls from the sky as rain, soaks into the ground, and eventually returns to the atmosphere through a tree or drains down to a stream. Here at SFU, where I will be teaching upper and lower division hydrology courses, I am excited to involve undergraduate and graduate students in efforts to understand and predict the health of forests and streams in British Columbia. Improved understanding is pressing: in the coming century as the southern part of the province warms, the winters get wetter, and the summers get drier, how the subsurface stores and releases water will help determine which trees die in droughts and which streams will have water at the end of the summer dry season. This research program is bringing together colleagues across SFU, UBC and in the provincial government, as well as collaborators from my postdoc (at the University of Texas, Austin), PhD (at the University of California, Berkeley), and MSc (at the University of Wyoming, Laramie).
Started as an assistant professor in the Department of Geography in January, 2020.