Kate Sherren

Landscapes - People - Global change

TranSECT meets in Quebec City

May 5, 2025 /

Things get started at the TranSECT meeting at Universite Laval, April 28, 2025

TranSECT co-leads: Ian Stewart (Kings/Dal), Melanie Lemire (Laval), me, Fanny Noisette (UQAR) and Project Manager Line Bourdages (L-R).

After ResNet I went straight to Quebec City for a meeting of TranSECT and the wider Transforming Climate Action projects. It was wonderful to spend more time with our TranSECT colleagues in particular, and start tackling some of our shared research objectives together over the Monday and Tuesday.  We worked hard and had some social time also, at the Temps Perdu bar near the Universite Laval campus. Ian and I invited our incoming PhD student Christopher Randall and our incoming PDF Jessica Beaudette, who joined us before their actual start dates to get a good sense of the community they are joining. And what a community it is! I especially enjoyed our discussions of risk assessment and governance, and of dykelands and nature-based solutions of various kinds. The generative scribing of Deline from Agora supported all some sessions, and can be seen in some of these pictures. We made particular progress on plans for some related workshops and events over the coming year, bringing together Nova Scotia and Quebec parts of the TranSECT team. It was also wonderful to see students and postdocs networking and starting to build a cohort feeling. This was supported by the shared bus trip home to Halifax on Friday.

TranSECT (Cluster 3.3) at the end of our sub-meeting, April 29, 2025.

Saving carbon by car-pooling home.

Last ResNet AGM

April 26, 2025 /

Elson runs an icebreaker: which way is north, again?

Alex Legault and I grab a local Stukley beer at Jouvence, April 24, 2025

It was wonderful but also a little bittersweet to join with colleagues from the Bay of Fundy case study landscape (Danika, Brittney, Kiirsti and Alex) and from other landscape and theme teams nationally, for the last NSERC ResNet AGM. We again met at lovely Jouvence, near Orford in QC. Though we are heading into the project’s last year, there were still lots of students present and clearly plenty of scholarly work afoot. We spent a good bit of time looking at what we’ve accomplished as a group, but just as much time looking forward: how can we continue to leverage this work and these networks to make progress in achieving sustainable working landscapes in Canada? Our key messages were workshopped (“stress tested”) and many new research threads were shown as emerging from ResNet. Thanks to PI Elena Bennett for bringing us all together: to do this work in the first instance, and for this last opportunity to gather, celebrate and plot.

Lovely Lac Stukely was a mirror.

New paper: Bay of Fundy system dynamics and scenarios

April 15, 2025 /

Former L1 ResNet postdoc Lara Cornejo has led a tremendous new paper, out open access this week in Ocean and Coastal Management. The paper, Decision-making and ecosystem service dimensions of managed dyke realignment in the complex coastal landscapes of the Bay of Fundy, updates the simplified one-way flows we conceived for ecosystem service tradeoffs in our baseline 2021 Facets paper. Lara used system dynamics modelling to co-create with a range of experts–from universities, federal and provincial government departments, consulting firms, an ENGO and Indigenous organization (all co-authors)–models showing the decision-making processes leading to managed dyke realignment and the ecosystem service outcomes that result. The models drew on lots of published papers and student theses, and allowed trade-offs and synergies to be synthesized. But she didn’t stop there! She and McGill PhD candidate Elson Galang used the four scenarios that emerged from our environmental futures workshop in late 2022 as thought experiments for the models (see below). It is a great read. Bravo!

Artist Emma Fitzgerald’s visualizations of our four scenarios of environmental futures for the Bay of Fundy dykelands.

Recent SRES visitors

April 9, 2025 /

External assessors Christopher Ling and Michelle Gray with me as they finish up their site visit to SRES.

We hosted some important visitors into the SRES suite last week. First, on April 1 and 2 we hosted Christopher Ling (of Royal Roads) and Michelle Gray (of UNB), who are the external assessors for SRES’ unit and program review this year. I’m not sure that it is supposed to be fun when your unit is being reviewed, but thanks to Drs Ling and Gray, ours really has been. We are looking forward to hearing what they have to say about SRES, MES and MREM after their 360-degree enquiries during their stay.

Federal Liberal candidate and 2004 MES alumnus, Shannon Miedema, visits the SRES suite, April 3, 2025

Also great fun was the visit of 2004 MES alumnus Shannon Miedema to the suite on April 3. She is the current Liberal candidate for Halifax, and visited the SRES student society’s coffee break. The students were interested to see her hard-bound MES thesis about her work in Palau, which seemed like an ancient document given they only submit online these days. Was glad to host, and ‘launch’ our new SRES stickers with her and the students. They went like hotcakes! Happily we’ll have to re-order soon.

Winter 2025 panels, presentations and events

March 25, 2025 /

Panelists and UNBSJ student organizers for the Climate Change Science and Action Panel on Mar 20 in Saint John.

On March 16th, this blog turned ten years old, and that feels like something to celebrate. But I’ve been a bit remiss on content so far this year. Last week’s visit to UNBSJ at the invitation of the Biological Sciences PhD student organization is a great prompt to remedy that. I joined a panel on Climate Change Science and Action with Moe Qureshi of the Conservation Council of NB and Helen Gurney-Smith of DFO in St. Andrews to talk across scales from global to local. The 2 hour discussion was followed up by a great networking event at the Haven Music Hall where I got to meet more of the students, some local partners and professors. Thanks to the organizers for the great event.

Earlier this term I also enjoyed meeting with the Local Government Group of the Green Shores program, a Maritimes outpost of the program originally developed by the Stewardship Council of BC run out of TransCoastal Adaptations at SMU. During that online presentation I learned that in December Green Shores developed an 8-page publication for the general public based on the final report from the NRCan project Making Room for Movement and the paper I led last year on Reimagining nature-based coastal adaptation using the 5Rs (reimagine, reserve, relocate, restore, reinforce), published in the Journal of Flood Risk Management. The policy brief, Green Shores and the 5Rs for Nature-based Coastal Adaptation , shows how Green Shores is operationalizing the framework we outlined. More recently I reprised my presentation to Green Shores  to the TransCoastal Adaptations Lesson of the Week group.

Presenting to the Green Shores Local Government Group on Jan 15, 2024.

Other key events in recent months have been profile-raising events for SRES within Dalhousie, including the Graduate Fair (in person and online) in early February, the Sustainable Development Goals Expo in early March, and today’s engagement event with Black and African Nova Scotian high schoolers.

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