2024 Women Advancing River Research Seminar Series
All seminars will be presented online live at 11:00 a.m. ET on the third Thursday of each month. Seminar recordings will be posted later. Please register in advance for all talks.
Salty Waters: Understanding De-icer Dynamics and Impacts from Source to Stream
Lauren McPhillips, Penn State (U.S.)
Claire Oswald, Toronto Metropolitan University (Canada)
Abstract:
De-icing salts are widely applied in wintertime to roads, sidewalks, and parking lots in cold climates for safety purposes. There is growing evidence that this, along with other anthropogenic salt inputs, is leading to salinization of freshwater systems. This salinization is of concern because of impacts on water quality and aquatic ecosystem health.
There is still a lot to be understood about the storage and transport of salt in watersheds. The first presentation will share research on drivers of long-term stream chloride concentration trends across the Province of Ontario, chloride retention in meso-scale watersheds spanning a gradient of urbanization around the City of Toronto, and multi-year chloride load dynamics in a large urbanizing watershed. These studies all point to the issue of legacy chloride pollution. The presentation will conclude with a ‘tour’ of the Black Creek Research and Training Watershed, where researchers are digging into process-based questions related to legacy chloride in a highly urban landscape.
As one of the first points of interception of salts, engineered stormwater control measures like detention basins have potential to affect salt transport and storage, which in turn can impact water quality processes and vegetation in these stormwater practices. Understanding these dynamics is critical to predicting effects on downstream water bodies, as well as to designing more resilient stormwater management infrastructure. The second presentation by Dr. McPhillips will demonstrate how salt impacts metals, nutrient, and sediment dynamics in stormwater bioretention systems, and how certain design considerations can improve overall outcomes.
Bios:
Dr. Claire Oswald is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at Toronto Metropolitan University. Dr. Oswald leads a watershed hydrology research program focused on understanding the hydrologic, landscape, and management controls on water and pollutant transport in small and mesoscale watersheds impacted by urbanization. Her group uses a combination of field, laboratory, and geospatial approaches, and collaborates extensively with non-academic partners interested in urban water quality issues, such as freshwater salinization. She has a BSc in Physics and a MSc in Climatology from McMaster University, and a Ph.D. in Hydrology from the University of Toronto.
Dr. Lauren McPhillips is currently an Assistant Professor co-appointed in the departments of Civil & Environmental Engineering and Agricultural & Biological Engineering at Penn State University. Her work broadly focuses on hydrology, soils, and biogeochemistry in human-dominated ecosystems, with a particular interest in ecological engineering solutions. She has a B.S. in Science of Earth Systems and M.S. and Ph.D. in Biological and Environmental Engineering from Cornell University. She was also a Postdoctoral Fellow for the Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network based at Arizona State University, and has previously worked for the US Geological Survey as a research associate in Reston, VA.