Kate Sherren

Landscapes - People - Global change

IASNR Canada

June 24, 2026 /

IASNR Canada conference attendees (minus John Parkins, organizer, who is taking the picture)

It was great spending the end of last week at the IASNR Canada Hub meeting in lovely Camrose, Alberta, organized by my long-time collaborator John Parkins, who is Dean of the Augustana Campus of the University Alberta. It was our first opportunity to meet formally as an IASNR Hub, before the main IASNR meeting in Oregon. It was lovely to be bombing around the township and range grid of Alberta after a few decades, with green fields and happy livestock thanks to recent rains. I ran a workshop on social science data infrastructure and policy, and presented on new results about climax thinking. The field trips to the Hesje Observatory in lovely Miquelon Lake Provincial Park and to the Driedmeat Lake reservoir and catchment were memorable (and not only for the very late night and the mosquitoes, respectively). The rest of this post is just photos, because I don’t have a lot of time to post today.

Fieldtripping

At the observatory

Requiem for a town

Alberta energy landscape

Rail at golden hour

Finally, I was also really happy to have been able to see some of our Bay of Fundy research sites enroute to Alberta, thanks to clear conditions.

The Belcher Street managed dyke realignment

The Avon River causeway

Grand Pre and Cape Blomidon

 

Celebrating lab achievements

June 10, 2026 /

Silly hat selfie: me, Keahna and Patricia after convocation, June 2026.

It is an exciting time of year. Convocation happened yesterday, and we had many SRES MREM and MES graduates cross the floor. But again this year, a SRES alum was also awarded an Honorary Doctorate during our convocation ceremony.  Since his 2002 MES degree, Jamal Shirley has become a leader in Nunavut research through his  roles at the Arctic College and the Nunavut Research Institute. It was wonderful to host his lovely family at Dalhousie and in SRES for the ceremony. It was also lovely to see new IDPhD grad Keahna Margeson cross the stage to receive her cape, and then join co-supervisor Patricia Manuel and I on the stage for the rest of the ceremony.

While we’re celebrating, I wanted to note some other good news coming from the lab.

MES students Bethany Poltl and Anna Macdonald were both offered SSHRC Canada Graduate Research Scholarships for Masters students for September. Anna was also recently awarded the Gordon E. E. Beanlands Memorial Scholarship and earlier in the term Bethany won one of the Mary Margaret Werner scholarships at the Faculty of Science level. That is after both of them coming in with Godsoe Awards. Athena Iraji, as she approaches her MES defense, has been offered a funded PhD at the University of Guelph working with her committee member Eric Nost. These are all dream outcomes!

PhD students have also been doing well. Chris Randall was awarded a Killam award to stack onto his SSHRC CGRS-D, Dalhousie Research Excellence Scholarship and President’s Award. Robin Willcocks Musselman won a Canadian Federation of University Women scholarship dedicated to those who have returned to study after a gap.

Postdocs have also been thriving. Jessica Beaudette won a MEOPAR Knowledge Mobilization grant to fund her TranSECT podcast, and Elson Galang won a SSHRC Explore grant to support his Killam Fellowship work in the Bay of Fundy region.

All these folks have been busy on the conference circuit and beyond in recent weeks. Wonderful to be part of such a team!

Fundy Monday

June 3, 2026 /

The marquee at the Al Whittle Theatre shows Fundy Monday on the bill

This past Monday we culminated the Bay of Fundy Dykeland case study of NSERC ResNet with a big-screen near-full-house showing of our new short documentary, Sea, Soil, and Soul: The Evolving Bay of Fundy Coastline. It was magic to show it at the lovely Al Whittle Theatre, right behind where my own segments were filmed on the Bishop-Beckwith marshland. This ten-minute video was flanked by an optional survey, so we could understand how it was received, and followed by a great conversation chaired by ResNet principal investigator and documentary producer, Elena Bennett. The star of the movie and the show was Don Webster, a dykeland farmer in the Belcher Street area who sold land so that a section of his marsh could be restored to tidal wetland. Danika van Proosdij of Saint Mary’s and TransCoastal Adaptations, Tony Bowron of CBWES and TransCoastal, and I were also panelists. It was wonderful to see ResNet student alum and partners showing up to celebrate with us, and to have such an engaged group to ask questions. The audience showed such clear love and concern for their dykeland landscapes, and had a strong appetite for information to help them understand its future. Thanks to postdoc emcee Elson Galang, MES assistant Bethany Poltl, the folks from TransCoastal, from the Apple Blossom Festival (we were its final event) and from the theatre itself, for the successful event. Action shots to follow soon.

Nearly a full house at the Al Whittle Theatre for Fundy Monday

ClimAtlantic conference

June 1, 2026 /

Robin, Alex, Chris, Elson, Anna and me, counter-clockwise from top left, at ClimAtlantic (missing: Athena)

Half of my team spent Wednesday and Thursday last week at the ClimAtlantic Connected Resilience conference in downtown Halifax. This event was a great place to network with academic, NGO, consulting and government colleagues (all levels) working on climate adaptation in the region. I saw many, many SRES alum over the two days who are now working across those settings. Presentations were given by Robin, Alex, Athena and me, Elson and Chris led a workshop, and Anna gave a poster (as well as a CBC interview). My own highlights (other than those by my team) included thought-provoking presentations by Matt Delorme of AIM Network and Eric Edwards of Macphail Woods Ecological Forestry Project. The number of parallel sessions was sometimes challenging, but the food was great. Congratulations and thanks to the team at ClimAtlantic for bringing it all together.

ResNet doco premiere at BOFEP

May 27, 2026 /

Panelists and ResNet alum at the BOFEP/ACCESS event May 20, Sackville, NB

After seven years, dozens of graduate students and rich interdisciplinary and intersectoral engagement, NSERC ResNet winds up next month. In ‘landscape 1’ (L1), the Bay of Fundy dykeland and tidal wetland case study, we are seeing it off in style. Thanks to the Bay of Fundy Ecosystem Partnership (BOFEP) and the Atlantic Canada Coastal & Estuarine Science Society (ACCESS) for letting us premiere our new L1 documentary about the changing Bay of Fundy coast during their town hall event. It looked great on the big screen – kudos to director Mark Wyatt and PI/producer Elena Bennett. A great panel with Danika van Proosdij, Brittany Roughan, Alex Legault and Elson Galang followed the screening, reflecting on the project and its takeaways. The audience had some great engagement, and headed away with some of our limited edition ResNet swag. Lovely to see some program alumna there, too. The next screening will be at the Al Whittle Theatre in Wolfville on June 1. There are still a few tickets available.

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