Kate Sherren

Landscapes - People - Global change

Category: Coasts (Page 1 of 28)

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

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.

End-of-ResNet Events

April 24, 2026 /

ResNet is coming to an end in June 2026! We have trained over 35 students and postdoctoral fellows over the ~6 years of the project. Moreover, the Bay of Fundy dykeland case study (‘Landscape 1’) contributed to training folks from other universities such as McGill and Brock who were working in the cross-cutting Theme work packages. Landscape 1, in turn, learned more about ourselves from being studied as part of a larger landscape of natural resource decision contexts in Canada. When we wrote our ‘baseline’ paper about ecosystem services and decision-making in the Bay of Fundy dykeland context the literature was pretty sparse: we have added significantly to that (including with this synthesis) and many things are still in review.

Two events are happening in May and June to celebrate our wrap-up. Landscape 1 is one of the three case studies that ResNet PI Elena Bennett chose to highlight with a short documentary. She travelled here with the filmmaker Mark Wyatt last June to do interviews and shoot footage and her team has been working on it since then. It is now ready to show!

We will be showing the film, along with a panel-based discussion, in two free events and we welcome your attendance:

  • First will be on May 20th (7-8 PM) in the Bay of Fundy Ecosystem Partnership meeting (with ACCESS) at Mount Allison University in Sackville, NB. This is the public forum part of the conference, which brings in people from the community, and so is free to attend. You can find details of the meeting here.
  • The second will be on June 1st  (7-8:30 PM) at the Apple Blossom Festival! We have rented out the Al Whittle Theatre on Wolfville’s main drag to show the film as part of the festival. Tickets are free and you can get them here.

We have a little thank you gift for all attendees, and will be asking for (optional) feedback at both events, too, to help us understand the value of the documentary.

 

DISP team success

April 19, 2026 /

The DISP team presenting at the SDG Expo

Four first-year students in Dalhousie Faculty of Science’s Dalhousie Interdisciplinary Science Program (DISP) have been working with postdoc Elson Galang to find new meaning in a survey MES alum Samantha Howard implemented around the Minas Basin a few years ago. With Elson’s mentorship they have done an outstanding job, learning statistical correlations and qualitative coding and applying them to the question of “who cares about climate change?”, one of the parts of the survey that we had not looked that closely at yet. Responses to the 4-question set looking at climate change concern was not normally distributed, which made their job a bit trickier. The good news is that the skew was in the direction of concern rather than ambivalence. The students developed a great poster, including custom art, and presented it to the SDG Expo a few weeks ago (where MES Athena and Anna also presented their work), as well as presenting the work to their peers, instructors in their final assessment, and to passers by in the LSC during a DISP poster session. Thanks to Elson (and TA Bethany) for taking such care in his support of these new scholars. And to the team–Alexandria, Tarika, Dora and Jane–congratulations!

Athena at 3MT

March 25, 2026 /

Athena’s single slide for her 3MT presentation

Very impressed by Athena Iraji’s three-minute thesis heat performance yesterday, so I asked her if I could post it here. Thanks, Athena, and congratulations.

Have you ever wondered what happens when policies don’t go through? It’s been unfolding way closer than you think- right along our coast. This dynamic, complex space we’ve relied on since the beginning of settlement, and long before that.

Nova Scotia, Canada’s ocean playground, our home! Driving along the shore, you pass beautiful cottages perched on cliffs and coves: small human dreams facing a vast, changing world.

Lately, the environment has been fighting back. Storms cut deeper. The tides creep higher. The coastline shifts whether we are ready or not.

The Coastal Protection Act was meant to be a safeguard — a policy, hope, for those who care about their home, their community, and their playground. for more than a decade, it lived in the shadows: delayed, uncertain, unimplemented.

And uncertainty changes people. It made us hesitant. Unsure. And sometimes too eager to act, to build now, before rules arrived, before chances slipped away. And now? After years of waiting, we’re told: You’re on your own.

My research looks directly at what happened during that long period of policy uncertainty. How did coastal development change when the future of the Act was unclear? Who built? Where? And what can these patterns tell us about how climate risk is governed when policy stalls?

And it was incredibly hard to answer these questions. The opacity of the policy is tied to the opacity of the data — and Nova Scotia seems to be lacking on both fronts. The more I worked with municipal and provincial open datasets, the more I realized how incomplete or inconsistent they could be. That challenge wasn’t just a technical hurdle, it became part of the story itself.

What I’ve found is that the absence of clear rules shapes the coastline just as powerfully as the presence of rules would have. Delay becomes a decision. Uncertainty becomes a force that moves people, and buildings, closer to risk. In the end, I keep returning to the same question they asked in the Rights of Way podcast: Whose ocean playground is this?

Athena competing at 3MT

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