Kate Sherren

Landscapes - People - Global change

Category: Landscape (Page 1 of 28)

New paper: Image auto-coding tools for SIA

December 18, 2025 /

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!

New paper: Q-method for rural large-scale solar

November 30, 2025 /

Last week a paper led by Emily Key (Snair), recent MES alumna, came out in Energy Research & Social Science, with her Dutch committee member Dirk Oudes (Wageningen) and I as co-authors. The paper,  Integrate and embrace or isolate and hide? Using Q-method to understand how to incorporate large-scale solar in rural Nova Scotia, Canada, is open access. This study doesn’t ask whether we should have large-scale solar (LSS), but how. Emily used Q-methodology, a statement-sorting methodology, with interviews, to identify discourses around LSS in rural Nova Scotia towns that have a range of experience with the technology. The two key discourses that emerged connect to some common debates in the literature around landscape management (see below). This allowed her to suggest important questions that should be discussed with communities being considered for LSS, questions that might be useful for lots of other sustainability transitions as well. Congratulations, Emily!

ResNet synthesis video filming

July 18, 2025 /

The dyke at the Wolfville Waterfront Park on Tuesday, with filming crew trying to stay out of the wind.

It has been an unusually hot week in Nova Scotia. Kudos to filmmaker Mark Wyatt, ResNet central team folks Elena Bennett (PI) and Morgan Jackson, and Ive Velikova from TransCoastal Adaptations at SMU for braving the conditions as they’ve been filming the Landscape 1 synthesis video around the Bay of Fundy dykeland system. My bits were filmed on Tuesday at the lovely Wolfville Waterfront Park. We had to film down on the foreshore to stay out of the wind. Heat notwithstanding, it was a lovely few hours alongside the marsh. Lots of human users–walkers on the dyke and fishers on the marsh–and birds such as goldfinches and a very patient bald eagle. I look so forward to seeing the finished product!

The filming team, sweltering.

Alex and Keahna at BoFEP

June 7, 2024 /

It’s summer conference season, and two team members have just been to St. Andrews, NB, for the joint Bay of Fundy Ecosystem Partnership/ACCESS conference. Keahna had the opportunity to present early survey results from her Petitcodiac causeway survey, and talk about the larger study of which it is a part. Alex talked about the qualitative data analysis he led from our recent survey of apartment residents around the Minas Basin to understand their perceptions of coastal adaptation options like raising dykes, removing them to restore tidal wetlands and managed dyke realignment. He got a runner-up award for his poster. Conferences like BoFEP that are focused on a landscape/seascape, rather than field of study, are wonderful opportunities for engaging across disciplines.

Keahna presented preliminary results from the Petitcodiac case of her IDPhD research.

Ever busy, Alex presented two posters at the same time, one on his work with ResNet and one on his upcoming MI thesis work.

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.

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