Landscapes - People - Global change
Jessica Blyth, online at my hybrid lab team meeting.
I feel honoured that Brock scholar (and fellow Newfoundlander) Prof Jessica Blyth agreed to spend the morning of her big new Nature paper launch, The Ocean Equity Index, talking about that work with my lab here at SRES. Starting with some of the most beautiful slides, we had a rich discussion of the approach, utility and opportunities their new tool represents. Thank you, Jessica!
One of the better titles I’ve seen recently is for a recent article in The Narwhal by Xavi Richer Viz, What’s scarier for Canadian communities — floods, or flood maps? It’s an open question, as far as I can tell. Richer Viz tells some interesting stories about public push-back in various locations after the release of flood risk mapping, putting Canada decades behind other jurisdictions with respect to such public interest information. I enjoyed my conversation with Richer Viz, telling him about the situation in Nova Scotia and sharing some of the research done with recent MES Samantha Howard.
As an early Christmas gift, the paper from Emily Wells’ MES thesis, in collaboration with the Confederacy of Mainland Mi’kmaq (CMM), has just come out in Ecology and Society. The open access paper, Mi’kmaw lessons for realigning land relations in Bay of Fundy dykelands and tidal wetlands, is co-authored with Kara Pictou, who was our key collaborator at the CMM), and Melanie Zurba, Emily’s committee member here in SRES. It draws on Mi’kmaw Traditional Knowledge and interviews with key informants to explore the significance of tidal wetlands, dykes and dykelands to Mi’kmaq and how they approach coastal adaptation decisions as a result. I’ll quote from the paper to explain the outcomes, also shown in the paper’s Figure 2 reproduced below: “Overall, these considerations informed a general preference for wetland restoration. Indeed, a few participants considered restoration an opportunity for reconciliation. Mi’kmaw TK holder Ducie Howe explains:”
I know that probably [settlers] are not going to give [the land] back. But they can, as a way of reconciling, reconcile with the land. And do right by the land…that means our medicines that grow in that marsh, and our food, our relatives that need that land to be restored and viable for them to continue… That would be a form of reconciliation.
Figure 2 in Wells et al. (2025), showing the balance tipped in favour of tidal wetland restoration.
Yan Chen’s second PhD paper came out today in a special issue of Landscape Ecology on Artificial intelligence (AI) and landscape ecology: tools, perspectives, and complementarities. The paper, Image auto-coding tools for social impact assessment: leveraging social media data to understand human dimensions of hydroelectricity landscape changes in Canada delivers on what Yan said to me at the end of her Masters work back in 2016–after coding thousands of images manually–that maybe there is a way for computers to do more of the heavy lifting.
Locations of the chronosequence used in Yan Chen’s PhD thesis.
In this paper, we use the pre-trained AI Google Cloud Vision to understand the social impact of hydro dams based on social media of a chronosequence of sites (see right): from Mactaquac in NB (built in the 60s), to Oldman in AB (built in the 90s) and Site C in BC (which completed while her PhD was winding up). The paper has insights for the landscape and social implications of dam, and the use of social media for SIA. Congrats, Yan!
A few lab members, and hangers on, celebrating Alex’s (right) wedding at Ramblers back in October
More lab folks at Ramblers
This has been an active term in the Sherren lab, so this is an omnibus email to note a few things that have been going without mention so far. Some have been big events, like Alex’s wedding and wedding party (see above, right), and conference presentations at the Atlantic Canadian Association of Geographer’s meeting hosted online by SMU in November (Alex, Bethany, Anna).
We’ve had a great schedule of semi-weekly lab meetings where everyone has taken turns talking about their own academic journey to this point. An unanticipated delight has been the delight that has come with baby and childhood photos in those presentations. Midway through the term, Chris and Elson hosted a lab art event that repurposed an old Ikea poster we had lying around, and the result was stunning!
The lab visits St. Croix dykeland with Dr. Jeremy Lundholm.
Squinting into the sun at Grand Pre (missing Athena)
More recently we had a (cold) lab trip up to the dykelands with CBWES plant ecologist and ResNet colleague Jeremy Lundholm, and followed that up with a Christmas lunch at The Church in Wolfville. A full term! Thanks everyone for the enthusiasm and engagement!
Warming up at The Church in Wolfville
© 2026 Kate Sherren
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