Homa presented at Laurier’s Biology Seminar Series

Homa presented at Laurier’s Biology Seminar Series on the “Vulnerability of cold regions lakes to global environmental pressures”.

Lakes, particularly those in cold regions, are vulnerable to a range of environmental pressures that are being exacerbated by climate change. A clear understanding of the future trajectories of these lakes is of crucial importance to the communities that depend on them for their livelihood, but in many cases meaningful predictions are constrained by limited spatial and temporal coverage of field observations and monitoring programs, and by inadequate knowledge of in-lake processes and their resilience to changing external drivers. Many lakes possess a number of common characteristics and function in similar ways, however, the responses to external and internal perturbations of data-poor lakes could be delineated by developing a generalized cold regions’ lake typology. Our research goal is to develop transferable approaches for predicting the sensitivity and vulnerability of cold regions’ lakes to changes in climate. Using a combination of field observational and remote sensing data series, and statistical and mechanistic modeling, we capitalize on our ongoing work to develop a roadmap for predictively assessing the coupled remote sensing and modeling evolution of cold regions’ lakes.