The research project, guided by Professor Stephen Smith, focuses on addressing environmental challenges related to water pollution and debris detection in the water areas, with a specific emphasis on garbage and waste detection on the water surface. The project entails a systematic literature review and analysis of various computer vision models to detect and classify […]

The dissertation title is “Optimization of Interventions to Reduce Combined Sewer Overflows (CSOs) (Quebec City as a Case Study)”. For cities where combined sewer systems are designed to transport both wastewater and stormwater flows in a single pipes network, during wet weather conditions, the volume of runoff may exceed the system capacity which results in […]

The goal of this study is to determine the links between two critically important sedimentary basins that record major changes in the Earths atmosphere and surface environment around 2.5 billion years ago. These basins are now on different continents, the Hammersley basin in Australia, and the Griqualand West basin in South Africa, however when they […]

Trait-based mass-ratio and complementarity effects shape community structure, population dynamics, and ecosystem functioning. A question remains on how these processes interact in maintaining forest biomass along the elevation. Leaf element contents will be used to test these interactions since they are surrogates of ecosystem functioning. An extensive survey was conducted during 2017-2018 along a wide […]

Metal contamination in inland waters is of key concern for lake and human health. Unfortunately, our present understanding of metal contamination in lakes across the world is fragmented, as long-term monitoring programs are rare. The study of lake sediments offers an opportunity to address this gap, as sediments preserve a record of the environmental dynamics. […]

Nova Scotia Power Inc. (NSPI) is the main provider of electricity in Nova Scotia. The largest disruptor to its system is the weather, which can lead to widespread equipment failure and outages across the grid. NSPI attempts to predict these damages before they occur to decide on the appropriate level of response and allocation of […]

Arctic Sea-ice extent is declining due to climate change. Wildlife, maritime operations and northern communities that depend on sea-ice for traveling and hunting are negatively affected by its decline. Monitoring sea-ice thickness is an important tool to help in decision making in Arctic regions but, due to the snow covering the sea-ice, remote sensing’s sea-ice […]

The increasing demand for low-carbon energy has begun to amplify the development and usage of nuclear power. However, the generated nuclear waste is radiotoxic mainly due to the presence of heavy nuclei, such as actinides along with other fission products. This rises the need for selective remediation and storage of all radioactive actinides using non-toxic […]

The project involves enhancing and extending the in-house fluid flow solver using advanced mathematical and computing framework to be undertaken at the host university. The current in-house solver code can be efficiently applied to aerospace, marine and environmental flow problems. The collaboration with host university will result in a more advanced version of the code […]

Wildland fires in western Canada are increasing in intensity and the area burned due to extensive climate warming and drying. This has caused fires to become less predictable for fire management agencies, with up to $1 billion per year spent on fire mitigation strategies. As such, the methods used for fire reduction in Canada in […]

As we continue in the new geological epoch entitled the Anthropocene dominated by human activities, habitat degradation and loss put fish populations in jeopardy. Ecological restoration is the process of assisting the recovery of damaged ecosystems with the goal of conserving biodiversity. With limited resources available for ecological restoration, it is crucial that these efforts […]

Non-sewered sanitation (NSS) technologies are common forms of improved and primarily onsite sanitation technology. It is estimated that globally, 40% of the population is served by these onsite sanitation systems. Research on NSS technologies lags substantially behind that of conventional wastewater treatment. The design and construction of these systems assumes the passive biodegradation of accumulated […]