ARBRI’s Integrated Hydrological and Biogeochemical Modelling Project was established to design, develop and create a modelling framework of integrated terrestrial and aquatic systems for environmental and economic assessment of river basins, which will be used to determine the interaction between integrated hydrological and biogeochemical modelling for the Athabasca River Basin. This project was established with funding assistance from the Campus Alberta Innovates Program, the RBC Blue Water Project and Suncor.
The team will also assemble the data and create a series of databases required for each application from various sources, including remote sensing land cover, climate, soil types, surveys and Geographical Information Systems (GIS).
During the past three decades, there have been rapid advances in various areas of computational and experimental technologies, such as complex programming, remote sensing, semantic technologies, and high resolution visualization. These new and emerging technologies are providing unprecedented opportunities to develop modeling frameworks of complex processes and ecosystems. This modelling framework is to integrate terrestrial and aquatic systems to simulate the dynamics of nutrients, water, vegetation, soils and pollutants through the coupling of biogeochemical and hydrological processes along the Athabasca Basin. The research team is made up of post-doctoral researchers, visiting scholars, and graduate students in this field from research centres around the world. Working under the direction of Dr. Junye Wang, the research team is working this modelling framework using their combined expertise in cutting edge ecosystem modelling, computing and semantic technologies, numerical computation, mapping and spatial analytical technologies by collaborating with internal and external colleagues in Alberta and beyond.
This will help analyze and assess the combined environmental effects from multiple land-use activities and contribute to environmental, ecological and economic sustainability of northern Alberta communities, thereby providing a new tool to help design more informative monitoring systems and experiments, assess cumulative effects of non-point source pollution and inform land-use decision. Information on this project will be shared regularly with stakeholders through meetings, workshops and symposia. Results of modelling and experiments will also be made available to the public through the ARBRI Repository.
Additional information: