UNews - Laura Chasmer

Broad areas of research awarded federal funding

caroline.zentner — Fri, 14 Jun 2024 21:03:34 +0000

A spectrum of research projects at the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge have been awarded nearly $2.6 million in federal funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC)

The funding is part of $693.8 million for several NSERC research competitions recently announced on behalf of the Honourable François-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry.

“This investment in ULethbridge research activities speaks to the excellence and nationally competitive research we do — everything from mapping fuels for wildland fires to bee behaviour and the dynamics of black holes,” says Dr. Dena McMartin, vice-president research. “Our researchers investigate topics that impact the ways we understand the world around us and the complex influences and interconnectedness of the natural environment, agriculture and food security, and deep space phenomena.”

In addition, Dr. Monique Giroux had her Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Métis Music renewed for $500,000 through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

In all, 14 ULethbridge projects are receiving funding support from NSERC through the Discovery Grant and Discovery Development Grant programs. Among them are the following projects:

Dr. Laura Chasmer, a professor in the Department of Geography & Environment, will use novel Earth observation and geospatial data to examine how variations in vegetation ecosystems, both in space and in time, may enhance and reduce wildfires in Western Canada. The research program, which will include Indigenous land managers and knowledge keepers, will develop new ways of understanding fire hazards and recommendations for ecosystem management to lessen the impact of fire and improve the resilience of ecosystems and communities.
Dr. Sergio Pellis, Department of Neuroscience, will investigate the role of rough-and-tumble play or play-fighting in the development of cognitive and social skills in non-human mammals. Based on preliminary findings, Pellis hypothesizes that species with more complex social systems that require them to negotiate more varied relationships will have patterns of play that train youngsters for the social skills they’ll need as adults.

Discovery Grants

The funding listed for the following projects is over five years:

Dr. Theresa Burg, Biological Sciences — Evolution of High Latitude Birds ($200,000)
Dr. Shelley Hoover, Biological Sciences — Interactions between social bee behaviour and health ($190,000)
Dr. Steve Wiseman, Biological Sciences — Toxicant Induced Dysregulation of Oocyte Maturation ($235,000)
Dr. Nehal Thakor, Chemistry & Biochemistry — Regulation of mRNA Translation During Cellular Stress and Apoptosis ($200,000)
Dr. Laura Chasmer, Geography & Environment — Spatio-temporal variations in wildland fire fuel connectivity and behaviour using multi-data analytics ($275,000)
Dr. Joy Morris, Mathematics & Computer Science — Unexpected Symmetries of Graphs ($135,000)
Dr. David Euston, Neuroscience — Risk, Reinforcement Schedules, and Dopamine ($165,000)
Dr. Sergio Pellis, Neuroscience — Social play, the prefrontal cortex and the development of socio-cognitive skills ($275,000)
Dr. Alexandra Tetarenko, Physics & Astronomy — Unravelling how black holes power explosive outflows ($145,000)
Dr. Stephanus Henzi, Psychology — Contingency and Specificity in the Structure and Dynamics of Social Behaviour in Baboons and Vervet Monkeys ($235,000)
Dr. Jean-Baptiste Leca, Psychology — Mechanisms and evolution of material culture in primates: Does object play facilitate tool use? ($268,690)
Dr. Jamal Mansour, Psychology — Measuring cognitive processes that predict eyewitness identification performance ($165,000)

Discovery Development Grants

The funding listed for the following projects is over two years:

Dr. Philip Bonaventure, Geography & Environment — Climatic, geomorphic and ecosystem-driven multi-scale permafrost modelling and testing ($40,0000)
Dr. David Morris, Mathematics & Computer Science — Arithmetic groups, orderability, bounded generation and automorphisms ($40,000)

The Research Support Fund supports a portion of the costs associated with managing the research funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, such as salaries for staff who provide administration support, training costs for workplace health and safety, maintenance of libraries and laboratories, and administrative costs associated with obtaining patents for inventions.

Alberta Environment and Protected Areas grant supports ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge research expertise

trevor.kenney — Tue, 16 Apr 2024 20:59:41 +0000

Eight ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge research projects focused on water storage, carbon storage, insect health, fish habitat and the endangered sage grouse will go ahead thanks to a $500,000 grant from Alberta Environment and Protected Areas (AEPA).

“We’re joining forces with the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge to look deeper into environmental issues impacting southern Alberta,” said Rebecca Schulz, Minister of Environment and Protected Areas, in a news release. “This grant will help us better maximize and manage Alberta’s water supply, reduce emissions, recover species at risk and protect the environment in the years ahead. This is a great example of government and university scientists working together.”

The three-year research grant will ultimately help both government and ULethbridge researchers better understand and respond to environmental challenges in southern Alberta and across the province.

"The Ministry's significant investment in these innovative and provincially important research projects led by ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge researchers working with Environment and Protected Areas colleagues is greatly appreciated,” says Dr. Dena McMartin, vice-president research. “The research includes answering important questions about water resources and habitat management, carbon storage in landscapes, ensuring diverse and thriving insects, birds, and fish populations, as well as human actions and interventions that affect water and lands."

The projects target diverse areas of research. Drs. Matthew Bogard and Sam Woodman (BSc '15), a postdoctoral fellow, will collaborate with researchers from AEPA and Ducks Unlimited Canada to map and define patterns of prairie wetland carbon and nutrient stocks.

In another project, Drs. Theresa Burg and Melissa Chelak, a postdoctoral fellow, will work with AEPA scientists to see how endangered sage grouse populations are responding to recent habitat restoration, namely oil and gas reclamation efforts.

Drs. Laura Chasmer, Chris Hopkinson and Craig Coburn will be focusing on the vulnerability of peatlands to wildfire. Peatlands in Alberta have been drying out in recent years, reducing their ability to slow the spread of forest fires and resulting in increased carbon loss into the atmosphere. In addition, Chasmer and Hopkinson will also work on a project to assess the province’s lake water resources.

Climate phases, such as El Nino, can impact the productivity of native grassland and wetland ecosystems. Dr. Larry Flanagan and AEPA will examine how these year-to-year variations in weather contribute to fluctuations in productivity and carbon sequestration in these ecosystems and how these factors in turn can affect dryland farming, ranching, irrigated crop production and bird habitat.

How rainbow and brown trout in urban rivers such as the Bow River are affected by the combined effects of exposure to two stormwater associated chemicals as well as increased water temperatures and decreases in dissolved oxygen is the subject of research by Drs. Steve Wiseman and Andreas Eriksson, a postdoctoral fellow, in collaboration with researchers from AEPA and the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Saskatchewan.

Grasshopper expert, Dr. Dan Johnson, will be conducting extensive field sampling of Orthoptera to determine their diversity, abundance and biomass in wildlife food webs. Orthoptera includes insects such as grasshoppers and crickets.

A project team led by Dr. Jodie Asselin, an anthropology professor, in collaboration with government researchers, will look at the impact of human activities on the ecology of the Upper Oldman Watershed to assist in the development of policies that balance the needs of recreational users with the protection of at-risk species such as bull trout.

“These projects will help to monitor and build understanding of the southern Alberta environment and potentially lead to better responses to droughts, floods, species at risk and less predictable climate changes,” says McMartin.

U of L research propelled by Mitacs Accelerate grant

caroline.zentner — Thu, 27 Jan 2022 22:32:07 +0000

Increased leveraging opportunity now available for small to medium enterprises

��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge researchers will help quantify the fuel load in Alberta forests affected by the mountain pine beetle, thanks to a Mitacs Accelerate grant in partnership with fRI Research worth $180,000.

Pine beetle study will help guide forest management

Drs. Laura Chasmer and Chris Hopkinson, professors in the Department of Geography and Environment, have partnered with fRI Research, an Alberta-based, not-for-profit organization that that conducts research to improve land and resource management, to collaborate on the creation of a 3-D map to illustrate the distribution of fire fuels in Jasper National Park. Using data from terrestrial and airborne LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) scans, two interns, Dr. Zhouxin Xi, a post-doctoral fellow, and Saeid Parsian, a graduate student, will work on the project for two years, with half of their stipend being paid by Mitacs.

“We’re looking at the impact of mountain pine beetle on the vertical and horizontal distribution of fuels for wildfire,” says Chasmer. “This is, of course, of significant interest to Jasper National Park and Parks Canada and especially to the town of Jasper. It allows us to figure out where the fuels are in the landscape and which areas they need to manage or remove those fuels so they can reduce the impact of wildfire.”

Western Canadians don’t have to look very far to be reminded of what wildfire can do. The Kenow Wildfire swept through Waterton Lakes National Park in 2017 and the Lytton Creek Wildfire, which destroyed the Town of Lytton, illustrates how destructive fires can be to communities within the wildland-urban interface.

“In the last 20 to 30 years, wildfires have basically doubled in area,” says Chasmer. “And in the next 20 years, they’re expected to double again. So the combination of things like mountain pine beetle, which is expanding in range because of warming winters and longer, warmer and drier summers, and droughts is making the landscape extremely susceptible to fire. Combine that with 100 years of a colonial type of fire suppression within these national parks and along the eastern slopes and it is a concern that needs to be addressed by fire managers.”

Chasmer says the study will also help demonstrate that prescribed fires and thinning of trees to burn off detritus in a highly managed way is a very important way to reduce the fuels.

“The public, in the past and until now, have not been highly supportive of prescribed burns, because people are worried the fire may become too difficult to manage,” says Chasmer. “Prescribed burns are applied under very controlled conditions to reduce the potential for spread to unintended areas. This is the best way to manage fuels for wildfire and the potential for fires in the future.”

“The work that Laura is leading in Jasper National Park is an evolution of our gradual expansion of our research activity in the eastern slopes,” says Hopkinson. “There are multiple research initiatives and partners and the projects are all intertwined.”

Their research has included surveys all along the eastern slopes, including Waterton Lakes, the Castle Mountain area and Banff. Partners include Alberta Environment and Parks, NSERC (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council), Canada Wildfire, Western Economic Diversification Canada, Aries Aviation International and Teledyne Optech.

Mitacs Accelerate grants

Mitacs is a national non-profit organization that works to support collaborations between academia and industry. The Accelerate program is designed to assist companies in hiring interns for a minimum of four months for a $15,000 stipend.

“It allows us to help a company bring on an intern for a period of time and Mitacs typically covers half of that intern’s stipend,” says Hannah Scott, Mitacs business development specialist at the U of L. “From there, as long as the project is longer than four months, we can make a project of nearly any size.”

In the past couple of years, Mitacs has expanded programming and eligibility and Scott hopes to set up more collaborations between the U of L and community partners.

“The really exciting thing is that we have an increased leveraging opportunity for small to medium enterprises (SMEs),” says Scott. “Instead of covering 50 per cent of the intern’s stipend, this lets us cover 75 per cent of the stipend costs for any company with fewer than 500 employees. We’re really excited about this and there are a lot of potential partners in the area that could make use of it.”

Mitacs also offers the Business Strategy Internship innovation program for companies working on new and novel ideas that don’t necessarily involve research. The combination of programs offered by Mitacs provides a wide-playing field.

“Mitacs can work with any sector and any department on campus,” says Scott. “We can work with any for-profit company, eligible not-for-profits, hospitals and municipalities and with students at any level.”

The increased leveraging opportunity is only available for project applications submitted before March 1. For more information, contact Scott by email at hscott@mitacs.ca.

Kenow Wildfire study shows burning soil biomass led to significant carbon dioxide release to atmosphere

trevor.kenney — Tue, 27 Jul 2021 20:09:31 +0000

Approaching the four-year anniversary of the Kenow Wildfire in Waterton Lakes National Park, a new study by ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge undergraduate student Sam Gerrand sheds light on how much carbon dioxide was released into the atmosphere from the event and how this data may be utilized going forward.

A tree in Waterton Lakes National Park with deep soil burning/loss.

Gerrand, who’s finishing his fourth year of study in geography, recently had his paper, Partitioning losses from fire combustion in a montane valley, Alberta Canada, published in the Forest Ecology and Management journal. The study focused on quantifying the loss of carbon dioxide from soil and trees in a 300-metre area that was burned in the Kenow Wildfire through the use of LiDAR (Light detection and ranging), and then creating a model that extrapolates the data to give an overall sense of how much carbon was lost into the atmosphere from soil and tree burn throughout the park.

“Trees store carbon when they grow, and many studies have looked at how much carbon is lost after fires because that is all part of the cycle of carbon and a contributor to climate change,” says Gerrand. “As fires burn, they don’t just burn the grasses, shrubs and trees, they also burn into the ground, and there haven’t been many studies focused on the carbon lost from the soil, and especially in montane environments like we have in Waterton.”

Gerrand found that carbon loss from the soil in their test area was significant, amounting to 40 to 45 per cent of that lost from the trees that were burned. He also discovered, when comparing wet riparian sites to dry sites, more carbon was lost from the wet zones.

“The reason we saw that is because the wet zones essentially had more organic soils available to burn, so when they dried out and the fire came through, there was so much more fuel there,” he says.

A burnt tree landscape with forest floor regrowth after the fire.

The Kenow Wildfire, which burned through Waterton Lakes National Park in early September 2017, was especially hot and severe. It came on the heels of the park’s third-driest summer on record and burned approximately 35,000 hectares, including 19,303 hectares in the park alone. Over 80 per cent of the park’s hiking trail network was affected which, ironically, was the impetus for Gerrand’s study.

“I grew up in Pincher Creek and spent some time in the park as a kid and always wanted to work on the trail crew with Parks Canada,” says Gerrand, who was hired for the crew shortly after the fire. “We were some of the first people allowed back into those burned areas and every day, walking around in there was amazing — it was a really special summer.”

He noticed how quickly plants began to sprout from the scorched soil and took particular notice of areas where the fire burned deep into the ground. Back at school later in the year, he talked with one of his professors, Dr. Laura Chasmer in the Department of Geography and Environment, about her work in boreal forests. He showed her some of his pictures and a project was born.

“Using a combination of field measurements and innovative airborne LiDAR technology, Sam and his master’s colleague, Jesse Aspinall, were able to quantify the amount of biomass that was combusted and likely became airborne, resulting in the kind of smoke we have been seeing from recent wildfires,” says Chasmer. “Sam and Jesse were also able to determine the amount of carbon (in the form of biomass) that remains in the burned trees, which are still standing. These trees will eventually fall over and rot into the ground, releasing nutrients to the soil, but also longer-term carbon dioxide into the atmosphere over the coming decades.”

Small lodgepole pine seedlings growing back after the fire.

The data Gerrand generated is revealing. In the two sites he studied, each hectare (an area 100m by 100m), he found the wet riparian site lost carbon equal to the annual emissions of 53 cars, while the dry site lost carbon equal to the emissions of 33 cars. These initial carbon losses from the soil are almost as large (95 per cent) as the long-term losses equated to the standing trees.

It’s data that could be applied by forest managers as they look at areas they know have significant organic growth in their soils and that have not been affected by previous fires. Waterton Lakes National Park, as a managed forest, had no significant fires for more than 100 years, making it vulnerable to a significant event such as Kenow.

Gerrand has yet to decide his future career path but has been inspired by this project.

“You can learn a lot about the environment through remote sensing and GIS technology, and I think it's pretty interesting how you can tie that into the way we build our communities and the way we manage forests,” he says. “If we're disturbing forests, and we're altering the way our world works, how does that affect us? We’re living on the landscape, so we need to understand how altering it affects our quality of life.”

Chasmer research group utilizing remote sensing to increase knowledge of wildland fire potential and behaviour

trevor.kenney — Thu, 19 Nov 2020 18:25:44 +0000

As wildland fires continue to increase in frequency, size and intensity throughout Canada, ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge researchers have received funding to work with the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) — Canada Wildfire Strategic Network, and in collaboration with the Canadian Forest Service.

Dr. Laura Chasmer of the Department of Geography and Environment.

The group, led by Dr. Laura Chasmer in the Department of Geography and Environment, is part of the cooperative research network designed to address national wildland fire science needs and priorities. Dr. Mike Flannigan (��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Alberta) is the principal investigator for the project that includes representation from researchers across the country — a group united in creating better emergency management strategies and informing forest management policy and practices, among others.

“I get the sense with this group they really want to improve fire management and our understanding of fire for community benefit,” says Chasmer, who will receive $750,000 from a total grant of $5 million earmarked for the network. “A key focus will be to work with experts to improve the forest fire danger rating system — the way we predict and manage wildland fires in the landscape. The way we have traditionally looked at susceptibility for fire is about 40 years old and we don't bring in geospatial information to understand where these fires could occur.”

U of L students Jesse Aspinall (bottom left), Sam Gerrand (top left), and Chinyere Ottah (top right), with Dr. Laura Chasmer in a field plot at Waterton Lakes National Park.

Chasmer and her team, which includes Dr. Chris Hopkinson, Chair in Terrestrial Ecosystem Remote Sensing, specialize in remote sensing and will use a multispectral LIDAR (light detection and ranging) system funded by Western Economic Diversification Canada to better understand where fire fuels are and where the potential is for fires near communities.

Flying over selected areas in planes equipped with LIDAR technology will allow them to quantify fuels within the vegetation canopy and understory in three dimensions and at very high spatial resolution.

“I'm interested in peatlands and the transitional zones between peatlands and forests. These are wet areas that accumulate a lot of carbon,” says Chasmer. “They're starting to dry out now in central Alberta from changes in climate. So those peatlands have a lot of fuel associated with them.”

The group will target select areas that have the potential to burn as well as measure trees and shrubs and areas that have already burned.

“We're interested in knowing how ecosystems are regenerating following a fire event,” she says. “Will they regenerate the same as they have in the past or, if they're sensitive enough, will they regenerate into a new ecosystem?”

If possible, they may mobilize the LIDAR system to fly in front of an active fire as it burns through the landscape and will also employ the system on a series of Fire Smart plots (test sites), where they will take measurements before and after a controlled burn to gauge a fire’s behaviour.

The research will provide excellent opportunities for students to contribute to the project.

“Each of the leads are very collaborative, and so for students, this gives them the opportunity to not only work with someone like myself or Dr. Hopkinson, but also with those from other universities who have different areas of expertise,” says Chasmer, who already has six students partially funded for the project and expects to add another post-doctoral student, additional masters and PhD students as well as undergraduates.

“There are also opportunities for internships through government agencies such as the Canadian Forest Service (CFS). I already have one student scheduled to do an internship with CFS in the spring term.”

Hopkinson, Chasmer embark on cross-Canada research mission

trevor.kenney — Tue, 26 Jul 2016 16:27:34 +0000

Dr. Chris Hopkinson, the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge geography professor named one of the country’s 100 greatest explorers in 2015 by Canadian Geographic magazine, will once again take to the skies to conduct surveys that will provide rich data about climate change, forest resources, wetlands, flood risk, permafrost loss and water resources.

Hopkinson and Dr. Laura Chasmer, Hopkinson’s wife and a fellow U of L geography professor, will conduct surveys from a plane equipped with a state-of-the-art laser mapping system.

Dr. Chris Hopkinson, along with his wife and fellow researcher, Dr. Laura Chasmer, will once again take to the skies to conduct surveys that will provide rich data about climate change, forest resources, wetlands, flood risk, permafrost loss and water resources.

“While the mission has many partners and several individual objectives associated with each site, my overarching goal is to assist with documenting and understanding landscape changes at a very high resolution over multiple Canadian ecozones, as well as the processes driving those changes,” says Hopkinson. “We’ve been doing these kind of trans-Canadian airborne survey missions since 2000 but this year is special because the technology we are using is paradigm-shifting in the way it collects data.”

Beginning in Ontario at the end of July, the duo will begin their trek westward. They’ll repeat previous surveys in northern Ontario and Manitoba, in northern and central Saskatchewan before heading to the Peace-Athabasca delta in Alberta. They’ll then do surveys in the Northwest Territories, near Yellowknife, Fort Smith, Norman Wells and Fort Simpson. The group will return to Alberta with surveys near Fort McMurray, Slave Lake, the Calgary area, the Castle Mountain watershed, Lethbridge and the Oldman River, and finally the Cypress Hills.

The LiDAR (light detection and ranging) system, on loan from Teledyne Optech, emits laser light pulses which are used to create three-dimensional topographical maps. The multi-spectral LiDAR data can be used by various levels of government to inform their plans and policies for carbon accounting, wildlife habitat management, greenhouse gas strategies and timber productivity, for example. The information gleaned from the airborne surveys can also help regions assess flood hazards.

While LiDAR systems have been around for a couple of decades, new multi-spectral sensors provide even more data that can be used in mapping and engineering and to extract forest attributes such as biomass, leaf-foliage area and stem counts. The new equipment can also survey through water to map river and lake beds. The equipment is capable of mapping the Earth’s surface in three dimensions at resolutions of 10 to 20 centimetres.

“With the new technology, which is only recently on the market, we can do all the cool 3D things we used to do with traditional LiDAR but now we collect more surface property information and this allows us to do new things like tree species mapping, which was always kind of hard to do in the past,” says Hopkinson. “This system allows us to see the world in a whole new way.”

Throughout the two weeks of the mission, the daily flight schedule will depend on weather and the presence of forest fires. Media interested in interviewing Hopkinson are invited to follow his progress via his blog and arrange an interview by email or by calling 902-840-1164 a day or two in advance.

BACKGROUND

Hopkinson is collaborating with several researchers on various segments of the mission, including Dr. Ron Hall with the Canadian Forest Service, Dr. Brian Brisco at the Canada Centre for Remote Sensing, Dr. Daniel Peters with Environment and Climate Change Canada, Dr. Shane Patterson with the Government of Alberta, Dr. Dave Sauchyn at the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Regina, Dr. Richard Petrone at the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Waterloo, Dr. Kevin Devito at the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Alberta, and Drs. Stew Rood and Stefan Kienzle at the U of L.

In addition to Teledyne Optech, partners supporting the research mission are Airborne Imaging, Kalus Air Services, Natural Resources Canada, Alberta Innovates, Ducks Unlimited, Silvacom, the City of Calgary, Castle Mountain Resort and Tough Country Communications.

Funding support is provided by the Government of Alberta, Natural Resources Canada, Government of the Northwest Territories, a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research (NSERC) Council Discovery grant and a Canada Foundation for Innovation grant.

��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge geography/ATIC researchers receive multiple awards at national remote sensing conference

trevor.kenney — Mon, 06 Jul 2015 17:35:47 +0000

The ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge was front and centre at the 36th Annual Canadian Remote Sensing Society’s (CRSS-SCT) national symposium held recently in St. John’s Nfld.

Three U of L faculty members from the Department of Geography earned awards at the symposium, while a number of presentations from ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge students, post-doctoral fellows and professors showcased the outstanding work being conducted on campus, furthering the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ’s reputation as a national leader in the field of remote sensing.

“It is always wonderful to see our colleagues be recognized like this on the national and international stage. It brings further profile to the Alberta Terrestrial Imaging Centre (ATIC) and the Department of Geography from which the three award recipients are affiliated," says Dr. Derek Peddle, professor of geography and co-director of ATIC.

��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ adjunct professor of geography Dr. Ron Hall (Canadian Forest Service, NRCan - Edmonton) earned recognition as the 2015 winner of the Val Shaw Memorial Award for his exceptional contribution in the use of remote sensing for natural resources management.

Over his career, Hall has made significant contributions to the use of aerial and satellite optical and LiDAR remote sensing in mapping and monitoring forest defoliation, harvesting and fire disturbances, vegetation inventory and biomass estimation as well as to the EOSD land cover classification project. He has also made significant contributions to training students.

The Val Shaw Memorial Award was established in 1990 in memory of Valerie Shaw, an executive with the Bercha Group and a strong proponent of remote sensing in Canada. The award consists of a certificate that recognizes lifelong achievement in practical remote sensing applied to natural resource management.

The U of L’s Dr. Laura Chasmer also received a major award. An adjunct professor in geography and an Alberta Innovates Research Fellow in Dr. Chris Hopkinson’s Artemis lab, Chasmer earned the 2015 CRSS-SCT Bronze Medal for her outstanding research productivity and early-career achievements.

The CRSS-SCT Bronze Medal Award was established in 2009 as an early-career achievement award to recognize emerging excellence in remote sensing in Canada.

Chasmer is a highly productive scientist integrating LiDAR and passive optical remote sensing in multiple research areas that include climatology, meteorology, ecosystem change, hydrology, northern studies and forest attribute estimation. To date, she has over 30 peer-reviewed publications in international journals, more than 75 conference proceedings papers and presentations, and has served on nine graduate student committees.

The third major honour involving the U of L went to Dr. Ravinder Virk, an instructor in the Department of Geography, who teamed with Carleton ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ’s Scott Mitchell to produce the second best paper in the Canadian Journal of Remote Sensing Best Paper Awards category. Their paper was entitled, “Effect of different grazing intensities on the spatial-temporal variability in above-ground live plant biomass in North American mixed grasslands".

The four-day conference also featured a number of special sessions, oral and poster presentations, a leadership forum, exhibitors, a feature session on the job market in remote sensing as well as a full-day summer school for students, and keynote addresses from Nalcor, the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), Urthecast, and NASA. The U of L presented in a number of these sessions and was prominent throughout the symposium.

A special issue of the Canadian Journal of Remote Sensing will be published in relationship to the symposium. The 37th Canadian Symposium on Remote Sensing will be held June 7-9, 2016 in Winnipeg.

For more information about ATIC and the Canadian Remote Sensing Society (including the above awards), visit the ATIC and CRSS-SCT websites respectively.

ARTeMiS helps Hopkinson get a better look at our Earth

david.kirby — Wed, 29 Jan 2014 18:59:28 +0000

In the world of academic research, acronyms are pervasive, condensing the titles of everything from funding agencies to prestigious fellowships. But in the case of ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge geography researcher Dr. Christopher Hopkinson, the acronym for his latest project is not only an easy-to-remember abbreviation, but also a symbol of the initiative’s ambitions.

Dr. Christopher Hopkinson is the Unversity's new Chair in Terrestrial Ecosystem Remote Sensing.

“I’m interested in enhancing our understanding of the environment and natural resources,” says Hopkinson.

With such an ecologically minded focus, it’s perhaps not surprising Hopkinson is using his research to pay homage to a Greek goddess best known for protecting the wilderness and natural world. The advanced-resolution terradynamic monitoring system (ARTeMiS for short) is a suite of hardware and software technologies that Hopkinson is integrating to improve simultaneous imaging of the Earth’s surface and what’s happening just beneath it.

A national leader in remote sensing technology and its applications, Hopkinson was named a Chair in Terrestrial Ecosystem Remote Sensing in 2013. He was one of three new Chairs who were added to the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ last year as part of the Government of Alberta’s Campus Alberta Innovation Program Chairs plan (a fourth will be announced later in 2014).

Previously an adjunct professor at Acadia, Dalhousie and Wilfrid Laurier Universities, Hopkinson came to the U of L from his most recent post in Canberra, Australia. There, he spent a year as an environmental research scientist at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, the country’s national research agency, combining ground-based, airborne and satellite lidar (remote sensing) data to estimate changes in forest biomass carbon stocks.

Today at the U of L, Hopkinson has received more than $233,000 in funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation to develop ARTeMiS, an integrated system of field-based sensors that will support 3-D monitoring of seasonal and long-term environmental changes and vegetation processes.

The initiative also involves U of L professors Dr. Hester Jiskoot and Dr. Laura Chasmer. In addition, while three postdoctoral fellows will begin working alongside Hopkinson in the coming months, he envisions that undergraduate and graduate students will contribute to the research in the future, supporting such activities as system integration, field testing, data collection and environmental modeling.

ARTeMiS will map and quantify surface and sub-surface features and rates of change. “The landscape is complicated,” explains Hopkinson. “There are many environmental processes to observe at once – for example, freezing and thawing – and those changes are imperceptible right now because we can’t see below and above the ground surface at the same time.”

ARTeMiS, meanwhile, will enable concurrent 3D imaging of the surface and sub-surface. And the resulting data will eventually help researchers to better grasp the intricate connections among environmental changes, such as forest growth, snowpack evolution, wetland regeneration, and climate change, natural resource management, human disturbance and land reclamation in boreal, alpine, montane and floodplain ecosystems.

“Without this new technology, it will be very difficult to get a handle on these changes and just how important they are,” says Hopkinson.

U of L researchers get funding boost from Canada Foundation for Innovation

trevor.kenney — Wed, 08 Jan 2014 22:48:29 +0000

From below the earth’s surface to the farthest reaches of the universe, ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge researchers are embarking on a pair of significant study projects thanks to research infrastructure support from the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI).

On Wednesday, CFI announced a $63-million investment in support of cutting-edge research equipment, laboratories and tools through the John R. Evans Leaders Fund and the Infrastructure Operating Fund. A total of 250 facilities in 37 universities across Canada will receive funding.

For the U of L, it translates into nearly $350,000 in CFI infrastructure support. It will allow Drs. Christopher Hopkinson and Locke Spencer, and their colleagues, the opportunity to pursue imaging studies both on the ground and deep into space.

Dr. Chris Hopkinson is the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ's Chair in Terrestrial Ecosystems Remote Sensing.

“The tremendous impact that Drs. Spencer and Hopkinson make in their respective fields will only be enhanced by this important investment,” says the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ’s Vice-President (Research) Dr. Dan Weeks. “The ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge has increased its research capacity through the attraction of world-leading talent such as these two faculty members and these CFI funds will help ensure the full potential of their research programs is realized.”

The funded projects are as follows:

An Integrated System for High Resolution Terradynamic 3D Imaging

Principal Investigator– Dr. Christopher Hopkinson

Co-applicants– Dr. Laura Chasmer and Dr. Hester Jiskoot

Hopkinson, the Campus Alberta Innovates Program (CAIP) Chair in Terrestrial Ecosystems Remote Sensing, is leading a study that will look at a range of geosciences research questions related to seasonal and long-term environmental changes.

The CFI support of $233,670 will assist in creating a suite of field-based sensors that will support 3D monitoring of environmental processes at plot to landscape scales.

“Our understanding of earth surface/vegetation processes and feedbacks are often limited by an inability to simultaneously observe causes and effects both above and below the ground surface,” says Hopkinson. “This unique integrated advanced-resolution terradynamic monitoring system (ARTeMiS) will be deployed to map and quantify 3D surface and sub-surface features and rates of change. From forest growth to mountain snowpacks to wetland regeneration, ARTeMiS will help characterize both natural and modified ecosystem dynamics.”

The work is significant in that it focuses on issues related to climate change impacts, natural resource management, human disturbance and land reclamation in boreal, alpine, montane and floodplain ecosystems.

Imaging the Universe in the Far-Infrared

Principal Investigator– Dr. Locke Spencer

Spencer (MSc ’05, PhD ’09), a Tier II Canada Research Chair in Experimental Astrophysics, in collaboration with an international team working on related research, is leading an instrumentation project that will improve experimental astrophysics observations in the Far-Infrared (FIR) spectral region, thereby helping us to better understand the formation and evolution of stars, galaxies and the universe as a whole.

“Within Canada, the need to increase support for laboratory-based experimental astrophysics has been identified as a top priority,” says Spencer, who just recently returned to the U of L through the Canada Research Chairs program. “Over half of the energy emitted by the universe appears in the relatively unexplored Far-Infrared spectral region. With the help of this funding, instrumentation will be developed to advance the technologies and techniques needed by future space instruments exploring the Far-Infrared. Many of the current open questions in astrophysics are waiting on better observations in this region.”

The CFI support of $115,200 will allow Spencer to develop a hybrid instrument combining a Fourier transform spectrometer with a spatial interferometer.

While the equipment will initially be developed in a lab, the overall goal of the program is to enhance observations from space-based telescopes. It will also support the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ’s continued emergence as a key contributor to astronomy research on both the national and international stage.

“This investment, in parallel to current Canadian efforts in the FIR, presents a ground floor opportunity for Canada to become a key partner in future-generation ground and space-based FIR astronomy observatories,” adds Spencer.

By funding projects such as those initiated by Drs. Hopkinson and Spencer, CFI is helping to ensure that Canada remains a world leader in terms of research and innovation.

“Canadian institutions benefit from investments in research infrastructure which provide the tools needed to be at the forefront of innovation,” says Dr. Gilles Patry, president and CEO of CFI. “The research conducted in these labs and facilities will also train a new generation of researchers which will help Canada maintain its position as a global economic leader.”

UNews - Laura Chasmer

Broad areas of research awarded federal funding

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