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Join us on Friday March 21, from 1:00-4:00pm in Richards 3504, University of Guelph for our annual celebration of World Water Day! 🌍

The theme for this year is Glacial Preservation – more information can be found on the United Nations website: https://lnkd.in/dmPq_Uq

We have an incredible line up of speakers, including Emmanuelle Arnaud, Jackie Goordial, Oliver Conway-White and Aaron Berg – you won’t want to miss these insightful and engaging presentations!

Refreshments will be provided, all are welcome!

This is the LAST call for abstracts for the conference “Ground Water Quality 2025” ! The abstracts must be submitted before 15th January 2024.

From June 10 to 13th, 2025, join us for this prestigious event, which will bring together experts, researchers, and professionals from around the globe to discuss the latest advancements and challenges in the crucial field of groundwater quality.

See the keynote speakers and submit your abstract on the website https://groundwaterquality2025.fr/

Registration will open this month

A series of sessions covering a wide range of key topics will be held, including:
– Interfaces and interactions between groundwater and surface water
– Point sources and remediation strategies
– Diffuse groundwater pollution from urban and agricultural sources
– Groundwater quality and climate change
– Groundwater quality modeling
– Urban and suburban groundwater
– Decision-making for sustainable groundwater quality management
– Multidisciplinary approaches to groundwater quality
– Emerging substances (PFAs, microplastics, and more)
– Groundwater quality at different scales: from laboratory to field, from site to megasite

At the University of Guelph, two of our faculty, Dr. Beth Parker (Director of MG360), and Dr. Ferdinando Manna will be teaching in the Winter 2025 Semester:

ENGG 6760 Groundwater Flow Systems 
Professor: Dr. Beth Parker Offered: Winter Semester (Odd years) 

Course Description: Groundwater flow systems connect water recharged from rainfall and snowmelt through the ground and discharging at surface waters or wetlands, sustaining ecosystems and water supplies for communities, whether taken from wells or from surface water. Groundwater represents more than 97% of our available freshwater, sustaining surface water flows throughout the seasons and resilience to climate variability, however, groundwater systems are spatially complex and dynamic.  Unlike the majority of ‘groundwater flow system’ courses that focus on the most transmissive zones (aquifers), this course also focuses on aquitards that play a key role in directing groundwater flow paths and rates and infrastructure support. This course provides an in-depth exploration of real-world groundwater systems using field studies conducted in a range of geologic environments and climates, offering students the opportunity to examine diverse data sets and measurement tools used by the profession to understand system conditions and quantify parameters needed to inform models. Familiarity with field/lab measurement techniques and data analysis methods prepares the engineer or scientist to address some of society’s most pressing challenges: managing legacy contaminated sites, protecting source water, building resilient cities with reliable underground infrastructure, reducing impacts from mining and energy extraction operations (i.e. geothermal, oil/gas) and effective waste disposal/isolation.  

ENGG 6790 Special Topics: Tracers in Hydrogeology  
Professor: Dr. Ferdinando Manna Offered: Winter Semester 

Course Description: Curious about how water moves through the Earth’s critical zone, tracking rainfall infiltration through unsaturated zone and recharging shallow and deep groundwater? This course focuses on the use of tracers as powerful tools to understand water flow and transport through porous media and fractured aquifers. By using tracers, you’ll gain the ability to track, quantify, and better understand water movement in the unsaturated zone, assess groundwater recharge, and uncover how these processes inform groundwater quality and quantity, which in turn impact ecosystems and drinking water supplies. Moreover, this course dives into today’s most pressing global challenges related to groundwater. You’ll explore how climate change influences groundwater systems, assess the growing risks associated with groundwater depletion, and develop strategies for the sustainable management and protection of this vital resource. 

For more information on groundwater focused and groundwater related courses offered at the University of Guelph, checkout this summary package:

One of Dr. Beth Parker’s PhD students, Rosialine Roedel, recently attended the 6th Cargèse Summer School at the Cargèse Institute in Corsica, France, from June 10-21, 2024. This summer school is an initiative organized by CNRS (Centre national de la recherche scientifique), NSF (National science foundation) the University of Rennes and the University of Oslo.

Rosialine was first introduced to this course through our collaborator and MG360 Research Scientist, Carlos Maldaner, who had previously attended the Cargèse Summer School. The program provides high-level interdisciplinary training on flow and transport in porous and fracture media processes. This years content focused on life supporting functions of the subsurface at interfaces between hydrology, geophysics and biological processes. It is estimated that over 100 people from all over the world attended this two-week program.

The structure of two-week course included lectures in the mornings, and seminar sessions in the evenings. The afternoons were reserved for practical experiments across different themes:

• P1: Environmental Sensing: From DTS to Plants – John Selker and Dani Or
• P2: Geophysics of the environment – Thomas Hermans and Damien Jougnot 
• P3: Transport and mixing in microfluidic chips – Joaquim Jimenez and Kevin Pierce 
• P4: Mixing fluxes and reactions in porous media – Joris Heyman and Pratyaksh Karan 
• P5: Discrete fracture network modeling – Benoit Pinier and Silvia De Simone 
• P6: Flow in porous media with OpenFoam – Cyprien Soulaine 

Rosialine chose Theme P5: Discrete Fracture Network Modeling, and learned how to work with DFN and different available software for modelling fracture network and analysis. At the end of the course, each group or individual developed a small project to present to the summer school audience. 

The first week focused on fundamentals in flow and transport in saturated and unsaturated zones, environmental sensing and reactive transport in rocks, life, and water interfaces. Some of the lectures included Dr. René Therrien’s (Université Laval, Québec, Canada) presentation, which highlighted the importance of understanding scale to better explain phenomena, Dr. Peter Kang’s (University of Minnesota, USA) presentation on how inertia can impact transport, mixing, and reaction in porous and fractured media, and Dr. Peter Bayer’s (University of Hall-Wittenberg) presentation on the application of Darcy’s principle to low through roots or spatial and temporal trends in shallow groundwater temperatures.

The second week concentrated on life functions of porous media, biogeochemical processes, decarbonization and upscaling from micro to large scale studies in porous and fractured media. Each participant had the opportunity to present their own work during the poster sessions, which provided opportunities for valuable scientific discourse.

Rosialine presented her poster during the first week and received valuable feedback from the professors and other participants. She thoroughly enjoyed explaining her work to well renowned scientists in her discipline, as well as those from different fields such as biology and physics. 

“If I had to rank the highlights, I would say the poster sessions, which facilitated network among participants, and the practical experiments workshops, which also provided a deeper understanding of at least one of the concepts covered in the lectures. And, of course, the beautiful location in Cargese, Corsica, during the summer was the main ingredient that made my experience unforgettable.” – Rosialine 

Thank you to Dr. Beth Parker for funding this incredible, once in a lifetime, opportunity.

If you would like to learn more about this course, checkout the Cargese Institute website and summary of the 6th Cargese Summer School.

Dr. Beth Parker, Morwick G360 Director and Professor in the School of Engineering, University of Guelph, along with Dr. Charlotte Sparrenbom, Associate Professor, Geosciences, Lund University, and Dr. Anna Thomasson, Associate Professor, Public Management, Copenhagen Business School, are urging changes to be made to regulations regarding “forever” chemicals, such as per- and polyfluorinated substances (PFAS).

Read the article here