Kate Sherren

Landscapes - People - Global change

Category: Built (Page 1 of 10)

Fall 2025 lab fun

December 9, 2025 /

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

Have you moved due to climate change? Study recruitment underway

October 11, 2025 /
Cars and houses in a flood

Sydney, NS, during the Thanksgiving floods of 2016.

A woman wearing glasses

Robin Willcocks-Musselman

Lab member Robin Willcocks-Musselman is currently looking for people who have had to relocate in the face of risks like floods, fire, or erosion. Her IDPhD study is trying to understand the experience of such relocations. This morning, coinciding with the anniversary of the Thanksgiving floods in Cape Breton back in 2016 that led to some residential buyouts, Frances Willick from CBC has published an excellent article to support Robin’s recruitment process: Have you moved due to climate risks in Atlantic Canada? This researcher wants to talk to you. Participating in the study will involve interviews to explore the experience and its impacts on attachment to the places that people care about. Learning more about this can help us advise governments about how to design programs when relocation becomes necessary in the face of unavoidable risks.  Please help spread the word if you know anyone who has been affected. Robin’s contact details are in the article linked above.

 

Causeway-related surveys in the field

March 27, 2024 /

Postcard invitations being sent to those living within about 4 km of each causeway.

Over the next couple of weeks, residents living near the Petitcodiac River causeway (partially replaced with the Honourable Brenda Robertson Bridge) in New Brunswick and the Avon River causeway in Nova Scotia will receive post cards from my lab. PhD student Keahna Margeson is running a study to understand peoples’ experiences and perceptions of changes to the causeways, tidal gates, and rivers over the years. If you get one of these in your mailbox, and you have 10-15 minutes to spare, we would be very grateful to hear from you. 

Addendum April 8th: These postcards have gone out to those on mail routes within–or that touch–a 4 km buffer of each causeway site. Mail routes in rural areas can be quite large. With Canada Post Admail we cannot control the outer edge of the distribution, and so you may have received the postcard even at a significant distance from a causeway site, but we are still very interested to hear from you. Many thanks for your support.

Halifax mystery

February 12, 2024 /

C. N. R. Bridges, Jun., 1968 (102-39-1-1280.6) – HRM Archives

I am working on a digital photography project right now associated with a sabbatical course at NSCAD, and spent a chunk of the weekend looking through the HRM Archives for images around my neighbourhood to use in repeat photography. In a fond of images called C.N.R. Bridges–taken to track infrastructure issues around the city for what seem like long-standing disputes around responsibility–came the above intriguing and quite shocking image from 1968. Can anyone help me figure out where this was taken? Do you know anything about the monkey?

New empirical paper in Ecosystem Services

December 11, 2023 /

Fig. 1. Building the case: the intersecting ways that ES was used to elevate the status of environmental considerations in urban planning and policy.

The first of Kate Thompson’s empirical IDPhD papers is out this week in Ecosystem Services, Building the case for protecting urban nature: How urban planners use the ideas, rhetoric, and tools of ecosystem services science. Based on interviews with urban planners in Greater Vancouver, Calgary and Halifax Regional Municipality, Kate and her committee describe how conceptual, strategic and instrumental use differ in the tasks to which they are put as well as who is using them (see above).

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