Urban Watershed Group Projects

Town of The Blue Mountains

On behalf of the Town of The Blue Mountains, we would like to thank you and your organization for your specialized technical support in a peer review capacity over the past four years… Your team not only provided timely review of all drainage related features of development applications but introduced updated municipal design criteria addressing changing climatic conditions. By unraveling the weather factors that impact snow melt potential, your team has helped the Town better understand how to be proactive in developing sustainable infrastructure.

Your team’s support assisted in keeping Town’s development projects moving forward efficiently. In addition to this, the review and introduction of updated municipal design criteria and construction standards addressing changing climatic conditions, continues to ensure the Town of The Blue Mountains fulfills its mandate for sustainable development.

Reg Russwurm MBA, P. Eng.
Director of Engineering and Public Works
Town of The Blue Mountains
February 3, 2014
 

Canada's Oil Sands Innovation Alliance (COSIA)

Check out this (Greenland) video of THREATS (an open-source cumulative effects assessment tool to help direct environmental management (industrial or other)) and/or planning of future projects. It enables the compiling and juxtaposition of public environmental data (including, but not limited to, wildlife use areas and environmental quality data) with on-site or "targeted" environmental data. For security, the provision to include data protected behind a firewall exists to enable analysis and comparison of potentially sensitive data in the context of other datasets. The goal here is to allow for predictive capability and in turn mitigate potential effects. Equally, this provides a capacity to enable retroactive assessment (investigation of cause) of observed changes. The ability to spatially interpret stressor/pathway/receptor data, and conduct analyses within the tool, while retaining data in its original database (secure) is what is truly unique here. Excited to see what can be achieved with this powerful platform in areas where it has already begun to be used!

Neal Tanna
Advisor, Monitoring and Risk Assessment
Canada’s Oil Sands Innovation Alliance (COSIA)
November 3, 2017
 

University of Guelph

The reappearance of excessive nutrient loading in Lake Erie and the subsequent algae blooms is an extremely complex issue and is quite different in nature than the previous phosphorous loadings in the 1970s. Unlike the issue in the 1970s, there are far more sources adding nutrients to the late and these sources are diverse in nature ranging from rural to urban. In order to understand the nutrient loading, both in the temporal and spatial domains, more complex analytic and predictive tools are required in order to help policy make sound, science based, and defendable solutions.

The University of Guelph is uniquely positioned to help address the issues around Lake Erie with long standing core strengths in both the agricultural sector and the environmental field. In conjunction with our partner, Greenland Consulting Engineers, and their watershed evaluation tool (CANWET^TM), we believe that we have the engineering and technology to extrapolate CANWET^TM from the watershed level up to the lake basin level and provide decision-making support for the entire Lake Erie basin.

Hussein Abdullah, Ph.D., P. Eng.
Director, School of Engineering
University of Guelph
January, 26 2015