USask water researchers awarded over $1M from Alberta Innovates Program

USask Professors in the Department of Geography and Planning and Global Institute for Water Security Members have been awarded $1,061,338 in new funding from the Alberta Innovates – Water Innovation Program.

Drs. Martyn Clark, John Pomeroy and Cherie Westbrook are co-investigators of a $670,000 grant that investigates the management and prediction of mountain water supply reliability through surface, groundwater and major rivers to inform water policy for river basin management and downstream water use (principal investigator: Dr. Alain Pietroniro, University of Calgary). The research team will use a combination of field observations and continuously enhanced computer models to diagnose the management potential of forests and wetlands to identify optimal management configurations to sustain water predictability and reliability under climate change.

Dr. Cherie Westbrook is the principal investigator of a $391,338 grant to advance the use of beavers as a nature-based solution to manage the impacts of climate change on water supplies in the Canadian Rocky Mountain foothills region. The project will include opportunities for amateur scientists to become involved in the project by submitting repeat photos from ‘CastorTracker’ photo stations pointed at beaver-modified environments. The research team will turn these photos into valuable data that will be used to develop an early warning system to quickly identify and deploy impact mitigation tools in locations with unwanted human-beaver impacts.