The Aboriginal housing situation in Canada is in crisis with a lack of culturally and environmentally appropriate housing. A Participatory Approach towards Housing Solutions (PATHS) Framework has been developed that recognizes and visualizes the strengths and limitations of communities, and assesses pathways with which they may achieve their housing goals. Communities are actively engaged in order to identify their aspirations and translate them into measurable indicators and associated capitals.

Projected climate change is expected to alter fire regimes across the boreal forest, which in turn will affect forest community structure, composition and diversity. The intern will examine the effects of changes in climate, and by extension, fire cycle, on the presence of three most common tree species in the boreal forest of Canada. Specifically, he will be tasked with developing a model capable of simulating the presence of black spruce, jack pine, and trembling aspen under varying fire cycles.

When plants are stressed they produce "reactive oxygen species" (ROS). Plants manage ROS with specific enzymes, many of which require micronutrients for activity. In the case of herbicide tolerant crops, the application of herbicide kills weeds in the crop but also stresses the crop for a time. The proposed work will test the hypothesis that crop plants will be better able to deal with stress resulting from herbicide application, when they are given additional micronutrients, in the form of Axter products spray-applied to crop leaves. The crops used in this work will be soybean and corn.

A plants’ ability to withstand chilling and frost damage will dictate the geography in which production can occur. Global warming is predicted to increase chilling and frost injury in crops. It is important to note that frost injury is one of the key factors limiting production. In corn, chilling injury is an ongoing constraint for global production and expansion which affects food, feed and fuel supplies. Corn is an important model system as it is the largest crop, on a tonnage basis, produced in the world.

The most critical region for winter wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) winter survival is the crown. Exposure to different environmental cues during cold acclimation improves the crown’s resistance to freezing. This key fact is not taken into account in the design of controlled environment experiments and may not reflect actual mechanisms of cold hardiness in the field. Acclimation to multiple environmental cues under fall field conditions could explain the improved freezing survival of field as opposed to chamber acclimated plants.

The purpose of the project is to generate soybean plants able to tolerate whole plant submergence and waterlogging (soil submergence). This will be achieved by inducing Pgb, a gene normally present in soybean and known to confer tolerance to excessive humidity, through genetic manipulations. Correlative studies between Pgb expression and performance under excessive water conditions will also be conducted in commercial varieties of soybean. Similar studies will be conducted to assess the effect of altered Pgb level to drought stress.

The role of infectious disease in declining productivity of wild salmon in BC is poorly understood. We will combine novel genomic technologies with traditional fish health methodologies and more broadly identify the microbe exposure of BC salmon. By doing so, we can examine their evolutionary relationships and their epidemiological distribution patterns over time and space as well as assess the pathogenic potential through histopathology, functional genomics, proteomics, and other clinical measures of condition.

"Underwater logging is the process of logging trees from underwater forest. It is expected that underwater logging will significantly increase in the coming years as the amount of flooded forests continue to grow due to dam construction and the availability of sophisticated underwater logging technology. Concerns about potential negative effects of underwater logging, like degradation of water quality and disturbed fish habitat, have led to the demand for sustainability criteria and certification system that can control underwater logging.

The proposed research project will conduct feasibility studies on the purification and conditioning of industrial, hemicellulose derived C5 sugars from a number of potentially commercial liquor fractions, derived from lignocellulosic biomass. In the first two Mitacs projects, enzyme hydrolysis showed considerable benefits over traditional acid hydrolysis for S2G’s bio-glycol production. However, relatively high enzyme loadings were still required to achieve fast and efficient hydrolysis!