CFI funds new Integrated Watershed Sciences Laboratory at SFU

Three Simon Fraser University researchers have received over $320,000 from the Canada Foundation for Innovation’s (CFI) John R. Evan’s Leaders Fund (JELF) to partner on developing SFU’s new Integrated Watershed Sciences Laboratory (IWSL).  

The B.C. Knowledge Development Fund (BCKDF) will match this funding, in addition to partner contributions, totaling nearly $810,000 in funding for the IWSL.

The lab is co-led by Chelsea Little, Brendan Murphy and Shawn Chartrand, all assistant professors in SFU’s School of Environmental Science. Through their respective research programs, they will work to advance understandings of how the natural world works, how humans impact natural cycles and processes and how these impacts may affect the landscapes, ecosystems and resources we rely on. 

More specifically, the IWSL will work towards two main objectives: one, to understand watersheds in the present; and two, to understand and predict how they may change in response to natural and anthropogenic influences, like climate change.

Watersheds play a fundamental role in earth systems, determining the flow of water, sediment, nutrients and water-borne contaminants. However, they remain challenging to understand and manage because the processes that affect them function at multiple spatial and temporal scales. The external drivers that affect these fundamental processes, such as climate, ecology, and geology, vary in time and space, from the local scale up to the watershed scale. 

Little, Murphy and Chartrand bring an interdisciplinary skillset to the IWSL, each with unique research backgrounds and expertise. Together, they will work to better understand and predict natural hazards, landscape and river evolution and the assembly of biologic communities. With Little, a community, landscape and ecosystem ecologist; Murphy, a physical watershed scientist specializing in geomorphology; and Chartrand, a geophysical and environmental scientist, they will work to address key knowledge gaps such as how watersheds will change due to loss of ice and snow, the provisioning of ecosystem services under future climate conditions, and geohazards after wildfire .  

This funding will support the purchasing of equipment necessary to conduct field-based studies on the structures, conditions and behaviors across watersheds and develop generalized principles and frameworks to understand and predict how a watershed of any scale may respond to potential external disturbances or changes.

In addition to advancing their research programs, this funding will ultimately support their students, other academics throughout Canada and internationally, and First Nations, NGO, and government partners with cutting-edge infrastructure and equipment as they work to tackle environmental issues facing Canada.