Kelp beds are marine sanctuaries, providing some of the most productive ecosystems on the planet and serving as critical habitat and refuge for many species, including juvenile salmon. Recently, declines in kelp populations have been reported by several groups including fisherman and kelp harvesters in the Pacific Northwest. However, the extent and cause of this habitat loss is unknown. It is thought that an increase in stressors associated with climate change (rising ocean temperatures or acidification) is a major contributor.

Phosphorous is the key nutrient limiting fish productivity and algal growth in Ontario lakes: more phosphorous can mean more fish, but it can also mean more algal growth, and potentially even toxic blue-green algal blooms. Multiple stressors like climate change, human land-use practices, and shoreline development, all affect lake phosphorous levels beyond natural geo-climatic factors. Thus, lake water quality is carefully monitored by government and volunteer-based water-quality monitoring programs such as the Lake Partner Program (LPP).

In the backcountry, avalanche risk is managed by first assessing avalanche hazard and subsequently carefully choosing terrain and travel procedures accordingly to mitigate the identified hazard. What are suitable terrain choices under different types of avalanche conditions and how are choices made? With this project, we quantitatively examine large-scale terrain choices in two commercial backcountry skiing operations in British Columbia. Our data set covers four resp. sixteen winter seasons with documented operational decisions on where to ski.

I am exploring the use of restricting blood flow from muscles (using a tourniquet or blood pressure cuff) to better prepare an athlete’s body for competition. This technique, known as ischemic preconditioning (IPC), has demonstrated enormous potential for improving the performance of already well-trained athletes. Preliminary work has shown a 1-3% improvement in performance in elite athletes, a 2.5% improvement would have placed the 8th place finisher 1st in the famous 100m butterfly final in the 2012 Olympics.

Throughout Canada, modern forestry practices have introduced rapid changes in Aboriginal livelihoods and natural ecosystems. This proposal is an effort to conserve and promote Algonquin traditional ecological values (TEV) within modern forest management practices with the objective of initiating new ‘social contracts’ and economies in co-existence. The research takes place in the context of recent sustainable forest development and climate change legislation in the Province of Quebec.

This research will involve working alongside the community of Inuvik, NWT to develop culturally safe solutions to address men’s boating safety behaviours in the northern Canada. The intern will spend time in Inuvik to learn about men’s water safety practices in the community. Benefits to the research participants, communities, and NWT Recreation and Parks Association include having the opportunity to discuss and voice concerns related to the boating safety practices of men in NWT.

Automated object detection and tracking in videos is still one of the challenging problems in computer vision. Generally, it is a very challenging problem due to the loss of information caused by the projection of the 3D world on a 2D image, noise in images, cluttered background, complex object motion, partial or full occlusions, changes in illumination, real-time processing requirements, etc. This project is about detection, identification, and estimation the location of all hockey players in a game in the real world co-ordinates using the broadcast video cameras.

The proposed project aims to evaluate the potential for a kokanee species based recreational program in stocked lakes of B.C. Recent data collected by the Freshwater Fisheries Society of B.C. (FFSBC) suggests that effort can increase by up to 400% once kokanee are large enough to be caught. The main benefit of this program is a potential increase in fishing effort and the recruitment of new anglers. The project will include estimating the biological capacity for kokanee using state-of-the-art stock assessment models of fisheries science.

The research proposal is designed to examine the relationship between footwear, metabolic rate and lower limb muscle activity following exercise-educed fatigue. This randomized, controlled crossover design experiment will consist of three sessions. The first session is a familiarization session. The second and third sessions will be the same, except the exercise will be done wearing either traditional or minimalist footwear models. For the second and third sessions, participants will first complete a running economy test, and then run seven bouts of 1000 meters to induce fatigue.