HHL News & Updates

The International Association for Great Lakes Research is holding its 67th annual conference from May 20th – 24th in Windsor, Ontario. Centering around a theme of Shared Lakes: One Water, One Health, hundreds of researchers will come together to share their discoveries in the fields of environmental sciences, public health, [...]

Exciting news! The University of Windsor National Urban Park Hub (UW-NUPH) website has lauched! We’re thrilled to share the work underway to support the priorities of the National Urban Park program, and to help usher in the proposed National Urban Park in the Windsor area. We invite you to take [...]

Meet Dr. Aisling Rayne! Aisling (she/her) is Pākehā (European-descended Settler) and early career researcher based at the Cawthron Institute in Aotearoa New Zealand. Her work broadly explores how environmental knowledge can support nurturing relationships between people and place.

Much of the research in HHL explores the community of bottom-dwelling animals known as benthic macroinvertebrates, which often includes mussels. As a community, benthic invertebrates can holistically capture the health status of a freshwater ecosystem based on who is there, and where we find them. Let’s take a closer look at one of member of the community, the Hepta-genius Heptageniidae!

Take a look at HHL’s 2023/2024 Undergraduate Thesis Student Projects! Our students, Giulia, Eric, and Sarika, have been working hard and are now entering the final stretch!

Everyone at HHL loves tea, especially watershed tea! The ingredients in this tea are not your typical tea leaves, but instead a series of dissolved components of the many aquatic environments in flows through. HHL researcher Shayenna Nolan is investigating DOM as a medium for measuring stream health, and recently published her undergraduate thesis in the esteemed journal Ecological Indicators.

An important member of the invertebrate community - Unionid freshwater mussels - are often excluded in regular monitoring. Undergraduate thesis researchers Dante Bresolin (2021) and Nolan Lachance (2023) embarked on a mission to investigate the relationships between mussel communities of the Sydenham River.

Invasive, non-native, exotic – these are all names attributed to plants and animals that have come from other places and have overwhelmed local ecosystems with their overwhelming abundance and impact on local species. Postdoctoral scholar Dr. Courtney Robichaud addressed one aspect of the relationship with Phragmites through an ecosystem-scale experiment on Phragmites removal during their PhD at the University of Waterloo.

Watersheds are made up of hundreds to thousands of channels that drain water from land into water. Research led by Ryan Graham involved a survey across 10 drains in Windsor Essex to explore the relationships between plant communities in drains and Phragmites management.