Atmospheric chemists in the Faculty of Science, including Professors Cora Young and Trevor VandenBoer and their graduate student Daniel Persaud, are participating in the 快播视频 of Winter Air Pollution in Toronto (SWAPIT), led by Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC). The study aims to better understand the mix of pollutants in Toronto鈥檚 urban winter air and why known pollutants haven鈥檛 declined as expected over the years.

鈥淭he unique thing about this study is that it's occurring during the winter months when there are different sources of pollutants from indoor heating to the de-icing of highways, which could have impacts. It is now evident that the levels of some pollutants are elevated in the winter months,鈥� says Persaud. 鈥淢ost of the other studies focused on smog, which normally occurs during the summer months.鈥�

Read the full news story from聽News@York.

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Three New Frontiers in Research Fund-International grants, with additional $3.2 million from partner countries, to support climate change adaptation and mitigation research in Global South, Scandinavia and Canadian Arctic

Today, the Canadian government announced the 2023 results of the New Frontiers in Research Fund grants (NFRF), including $6.1 million for three 快播视频-led research collaborations that will focus on how vulnerable communities 鈥� including those in Bangladesh, Costa Rica, Ghana, Guatemala, Kenya, the Philippines, Rwanda, Scandinavia, and Canada鈥檚 Arctic region 鈥� could mitigate or adapt to climate change.

鈥淐limate change and its various economic and social impacts are observed globally. By supporting game-changing interdisciplinary research and fostering international collaboration for innovative projects, our government is committed to finding innovative solutions that could have a significant impact on some of the world鈥檚 most vulnerable populations,鈥� said National Revenue Minister Marie-Claude Bibeau, announcing $60 million allocated across 32 research teams through the International Joint Initiative for Research in Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation Competition, during an event at Carleton University in Ottawa.

Research funders from Brazil, Germany, Norway, South Africa, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States, collaborated on the initiative. Together, more than $30 million in additional funding was contributed to the research projects by the international funders, according to a Canada Research Coordinating Committee .

鈥淭oday鈥檚 funding announcement highlights our country鈥檚 commitment to support international research collaborations led by Canadian academic leaders like 快播视频 researchers who engage in incredibly important global projects,鈥� says Amir Asif, 快播视频鈥檚 vice-president research and innovation. 鈥淚 thank Canada and other funding partner countries for their support, and I commend York鈥檚 research community for their continued commitment to tackling the most significant threat to our planet and the future of humanity, climate change.鈥�

The projects will examine how changing sea ice and snow conditions in Northern Canada and Alaska are affecting the lives of Indigenous Peoples; how coastal communities in Bangladesh, Ghana and the Philippines can be negatively affected by climate change adaptation programs; and how support for good governance practices can halt biodiversity decline and accelerate nature-based solutions for climate change adaptation in Central America and East Africa.

BioCAM4 鈥� Biodiversity Integration in Climate Adaptation and Mitigation Actions for Planet, People, and Human Health:

Professor Idil Boran, an expert in applied environmental governance and public policy in the Department of Philosophy and a Faculty Fellow at York鈥檚 Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health, has secured $3.1 million as the principal investigator and lead for the consortium project. This includes $1.6 million in grants from and .

The objective of the project is to develop methodologies for mapping Nature-based Climate Action trends worldwide and assessing local opportunities and challenges through deep-dive studies in two biodiversity hot-spot regions: East Africa and Central America, where vulnerable groups and communities are among the most affected by climate impacts, least responsible for it, and have reduced adaptive capacity due to social and economic fragility.

In partnerships with research institutes, non-governmental organizations, and universities in Kenya, Rwanda, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Germany, Netherlands, and the UK, the team will work on outputs to serve as a blueprint for counterparts facing similar risks within low- and middle-income countries. With open-access global databases, toolkits and policy-engagement processes rooted in open and collaborative science principles, the project will generate resources for researchers and practitioners worldwide.

, an ecologist with extensive experience in interdisciplinary research and science policy who served as the director of the Institute for Research Innovation in Sustainability, is the co-principal investigator from 快播视频. Other York researchers on the project鈥檚 core team are Faculty of Health and Gender, Sexuality and Women鈥檚 Studies . Environmental and Urban Change , director of York鈥檚 Las Nubes Eco-campus in Costa Rica, is one of the collaborating partners.

Climate Change Adaptation, Dispossession and Displacement: Co-constructing Solutions with Coastal Vulnerable Groups in Africa and Asia:

Migration and critical health psychology scholar, , in the Department of Psychology who conducts community-based research in both conflict and environment induced forced migration, will receive $3.1 million, including $1.4 million from the and UKRI for the project, as its principal investigator. in the Department of Equity Studies is a co-principal investigator. She is an interdisciplinary migration and international development scholar and the incoming director of York鈥檚 Centre for Refugee Studies, which will host the project.

In partnership with research institutes, universities, and community organizations in Bangladesh, Canada, Ghana, Norway, Philippines and the UK, the project will focus on gendered processes of displacement, dispossession, and other unintended negative impacts of climate-adaptation projects. Focusing on coastal communities of Bangladesh, Ghana and the Philippines, the team will collaboratively develop an intersectional framework for adaptation and build community-centred interventions to avoid maladaptation.

The team will also co-develop low-tech, mobile phone applications and virtual platforms for communities to share and document their knowledge, strategies, innovations and concerns with one another. These tools can help in sharing local community responses, as well as informing future programming and supporting a collaborative, intersectional, contextualized and equitable framework for adaptation.

Climate changed transportation: holistic and Indigenous informed responses to transportation infrastructure, food security and community well-being in the Arctic:

As the principal investigator, York Research Chair in Global Change Biology Professor Sapna Sharma, the inaugural director of the United Nations Institute for Training and Research Global Water Academy, whose research interest is in predicting the effects of environmental stressors 鈥� such as climate change, invasive species and habitat alteration 鈥� on lakes, will receive nearly $3.1 million for the project.

The project will co-develop adaptation measures and technological solutions to decrease the frequency of drownings and accidents in response to hazardous cryospheric conditions for Arctic Indigenous communities, and promote enhanced mobility and food security, in addition to physical and mental health. The main goals of the researchers are to map and forecast safe cryospheric conditions across the Arctic and explore observational and modelling tools to enhance Indigenous capacity in stewarding their land.

With a vision of empowerment, unity and resilience in the face of complex challenges, the research team will co-create knowledge mobilization products for promoting knowledge exchange across generations and communities by transcending transdisciplinary research and community boundaries across the Arctic.

, in York鈥檚 Department of Civil Engineering, who studies water resources engineering focusing on research areas including sustainable water-resource management and infrastructure and the impacts of climate change on these systems, and in the Department of Earth and Space Science and Engineering, whose climate-dynamics research has helped to clarify the physical processes driving long-term changes in the atmospheric circulation, with implications on Arctic sea ice motion, are co-applicants on the grant.

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As Toronto gets hotter, muggier and wildfire smoke increasingly wafts through the atmosphere, researchers at 快播视频 are leading a team of atmospheric scientists in testing the city鈥檚 air pollution from their rooftop Air Quality Research Station for six weeks this summer.

Preliminary results show the negative impacts on Toronto鈥檚 air quality caused by wildfire smoke. Although Toronto鈥檚 air pollution has generally been improving over the past few decades, smoke in the city is reversing these improvements.

The research project, Toronto Halogens, Emissions, Contaminants, and Inorganics eXperiment (), with science lead Associate Professor Cora Young and logistics lead Assistant Professor Trevor VandenBoer, both of 快播视频鈥檚 Faculty of Science, is designed to analyze areas of uncertainty in the air we breathe to better understand what is contributing to the city's air pollution.

One of the things the team hopes to understand, is how a soupy mix of trace chemicals will sometimes combine to create little understood, new and changing threats that can contribute to worse air quality, including emissions from products we use every day, such as paint and pesticides and even perfume, greenhouse gases, as well as perfluorocarboxylic acids (known as 鈥渇orever chemicals鈥�), and particulate matter - tiny particles of smoke, dust, pollen, emissions and fumes.

鈥淭here is still so much we don鈥檛 know about what鈥檚 impacting the air we breathe, and until we do, it鈥檚 difficult to effectively target contaminants that are affecting our air quality now and into the future,鈥� says Young.

This project is important as it allows us to take a robust look at all the pollutants circulating in the air. The Montreal Protocol was successful in helping to fix the ozone layer above us because we knew what to target, but ground-level ozone and other contaminants can still be an issue, particularly spiking on hot summer days, creating poor air quality which can impact people鈥檚 health."

Ground-level ozone forms when nitrogen dioxide mixes with volatile organic compounds鈥�(VOCs) and sunlight. Although emissions of VOCs from fossil fuels have been declining, consumer and industrial volatile chemical products are an increasing, but understudied, source of VOCs.

THE CIX project is part of an international field campaign 鈥� Atmospheric Emissions and Reactions Observed from Megacities to Marine Areas () 鈥� across North America organized by the NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) with projects in New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, as well as Toronto. NOAA and NASA launched their massive air quality research summer campaign today with scientists from NOAA, NASA and 21 universities from three countries. State-of-the-art instruments are being deployed in multiple, coordinated research campaigns this month, including at 快播视频, to investigate how air pollution sources have shifted over recent decades.

At 快播视频, researchers from 快播视频, the University of Toronto, University of York (UK), the University of British Columbia, and Environment and Climate Change Canada are already taking readings from a room packed with unique, sophisticated and highly sensitive equipment 鈥� some of which was shipped from the UK and BC 鈥� on the roof of the Petrie Science Building on York鈥檚 Keele Campus.

The goal of the campaign is to assess air quality across urban centres to understand what is impacting air pollution and how it鈥檚 changing. THE CIX team hopes to better understand several areas that contribute to air pollution in the GTA.

In addition to the rooftop measurements, the , a flying science laboratory packed with instruments, will cruise over campus this August to take air quality readings from higher in the atmosphere to compare with the rooftop readings.

Data collected by THE CIX will also be compared with key air pollution observations from the recently launched NASA TEMPO instrument, the first geostationary satellite dedicated to air quality over North America.

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Media release from July 25, 2023

快播视频 researchers take novel approach to look at history of deep-water oxygen in Lake Erie through insect larvae in lake sediment over last 150 years.

Researchers at 快播视频 went searching for the fossilized remains of small insect larvae called chironomids, found in sediment in Lake Erie, to find a history of deep water oxygen deprivation in the lake that continues today.

鈥淥ur results indicate that Lake Erie has suffered declines and depletion of bottom oxygen in the past, including prior to major Euro-American settlements, however, it wasn鈥檛 as bad as it is today,鈥� says senior author and Associate Professor Roberto Quinlan. If oxygen continues to decrease, Lake Erie will likely see more algal blooms occurring in the future.

Until now, understanding the oxygen dynamics in Lake Erie was more speculative. The current research, led by former York grad student Dmitri Perlov, is novel in that it looked at how an organism, such as chironomid larvae, which is highly sensitive to changing oxygen levels, was affected over the past 150 years.

The researchers studied the presence of these tiny larvae, which metamorphosize into midges as adults, in lake sediment cores from today to before pre-industrial times. They found oxygen depletion rates ramped up as populations increased and agriculture intensified after industrialization in the 1950s, which was likely exacerbated by the development and increased use of phosphorus-rich chemical fertilizers and household detergents. It was particularly bad in the 1960s and 70s. Water clarity started to improve in the 80s and 90s following phosphorus abatement programs initiated in the early 1970s, but oxygen levels have not recovered.

Poor water quality has a lot to do with the lack of deep-water oxygen, which can spur summer algal blooms that can affect the drinking water for millions of people around Lake Erie, and it also means that when there is a temperature inversion, which sends deep waters devoid of oxygen to the surface, it can cause a massive kill-off of fish, that can have major effects on commercial fishing.

鈥淥f all the Great Lakes, Lake Erie is the most stressed by human influence and has the poorest water quality so it is of great interest to both the United States and Canadian federal governments, and all the state and provincial governments that border the Great Lakes,鈥� says Quinlan of 快播视频鈥檚 Faculty of Science.

Low oxygen levels at the bottom of the lake can produce a chemical environment where phosphorus, a primary nutrient for algae, is released from the sediments.

鈥淎 central pillar of water quality research is trying to control phosphorus. If you get a lake that loses its oxygen and all of this stored phosphorus is released from the sediments, all of these efforts by governments and society to control phosphorus, it鈥檚 all undone by this chemical process that releases a huge amount of phosphorus back into the water and fuels algal blooms,鈥� says Quinlan.

This creates conditions for algal blooms, including harmful cyanobacterial blooms, which turns the water blue-green, makes it smell and taste bad, and can be toxic to humans, pets and livestock, making tap water unsafe to drink.

鈥淥ur study鈥檚 results emphasize the vulnerability of Lake Erie to low oxygen because it naturally had periods of low oxygen prior to large scale European settlement, urbanization, industrialization, agricultural fertilizers and all these additional stressors that make Lake Erie that much more vulnerable to low oxygen,鈥� says Quinlan.

Climate change is what really concerns Quinlan. A warmer climate means warmer winters and shorter ice coverage as well as warmer summers which causes a further loss of oxygen in the deep layers.

鈥淐limate warming is already underway, and this is something that will take decades to reverse,鈥� he says.

Some 13.2 million people live within the Lake Erie watershed, the most populated of the Great Lakes, representing about 34 per cent of the total population in the Great Lakes catchment area.

Lake Erie is a bellwether for other Great Lakes as it has changed the most in response stress and remediation. The researchers say that wide-scale watershed actions are needed if Lake Erie鈥檚 water quality and deep-water oxygen levels are to improve.

The paper, , was published in the Journal of Great Lakes Research.

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Congratulations to Biology Professor Sapna Sharma on being named among the 15 newest York Research Chairs (YRC), an internal program that mirrors the national Canada Research Chairs program which recognizes world-leading researchers in a variety of fields.

鈥淭he York Research Chair program is an important complement to the Canada Research Chair program to advance our efforts to strengthen research and related creative activities across the University and enhance the well-being of the communities we serve,鈥� says President and Vice-Chancellor Rhonda Lenton. 鈥淢y warm congratulations to the newest recipients on this achievement.鈥�

Sharma was appointed as a Tier 2 YRC in Global Change Biology. Her research as YRC will seek to gain a deeper understanding of the ecological impacts of climate change on freshwater availability and quality. Sharma鈥檚 research will capitalize on long-term climatic and ecological time series collected from thousands of lakes and apply cutting-edge statistical and machine learning analyses to forecast the impacts of global environmental change on freshwater security and help to explain macroecological patterns, drivers and impacts of worldwide lake responses to climate change. The research program will collaborate with researchers across disciplines to develop technological, natural, health and social solutions to water security.

Read the full .

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In its 17th year, the Science Explorations Summer Day Camp offers week-long camps exploring science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) through hands-on experiments, connected to the Ontario science curriculum, and led by undergraduate and graduate science or engineering students, teacher candidates, Ontario certified teachers and professors.

For this year鈥檚 camp sessions, the program team has continued to evolve the curriculum to reflect York鈥檚 ongoing commitment to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Among the new additions is Sustainable Science, a Grade 7 to 8 camp, which runs from July 24 to 28 and Aug. 21 to 25. The new program will explore the science behind climate crises, while also empowering campers to use their STEM knowledge to design solutions for a healthier planet.

Sustainable Science may be dedicated to looking at the SDGs, but other programs will address them as well. 鈥淎ll of our curriculum will touch on some aspect of the SDGs,鈥� says Cora Reist, manager of science engagement programs, of the more than a dozen camps being offered this summer. 鈥淪ome of our programs are pre-existing programs, but we will have activities that lend themselves towards talking and discussing certain UN SDG goals.鈥�

The camp team aims to do so by providing training to instructors on the SDGs and how to utilize the York toolkits on integrating the SDGs into the classroom, and encouraging Instructors to organically adapt camp programs to address them.

The evolving curriculum is not just reflective of the University鈥檚 priorities, but those attending the camp. 鈥淲e see that a lot of kids are pushing for learning more about conservation, biodiversity and how can they become global citizens even at an early age,鈥� Reist says. The evolving programming is meant to provide that, but also something else: hope. 鈥淭he youth that I speak to sometimes get very sad about the state of things. By integrating ideas of sustainability and becoming a global citizen into our program, I鈥檓 hoping to put a positive spin on how we can take action and how there is hope for the future.鈥�

Science Explorations Summer Camp will run weekly from July 4 to Aug. 25 with each camp one week in length, running from Monday to Friday, from 9:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.

Further information about programming can be found here. Those interested in registering can do so .

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The delegates will lead a panel discussion on water security and climate change; the panel is one of a select group of side events included in the program.

鈥淰ery few side events led by a university were approved. My colleagues and I are excited for this opportunity on the international stage to demonstrate York鈥檚 exemplary work in this field,鈥� said Sapna Sharma, an associate professor in the Department of Biology, Faculty of Science, and one of the world鈥檚 foremost experts on the effects of climate change on lake ice and water quality.

鈥淥ur panel will amplify Indigenous and Black voices, and focus on the challenges that these marginalized communities face with respect to water security globally,鈥� Sharma said. 鈥淲e will also talk about technological solutions and what people are doing to help solve the water crisis in their own way.鈥�

The York delegation will be joined on the panel by researchers from Toronto Metropolitan University and Queen鈥檚 University, as well as representatives from: Global Water Promise, a non-profit organization focused on bringing clean water to developing countries; Stockholm International Water Institute, a foundation for water governance; and mWater, a free data management platform for water and sanitation providers.

For Sharma, the panel鈥檚 model of knowledge co-production is critical to creating the climate resiliency necessary for the future.

鈥淏y merging knowledge together, we can come up with better policies and tangible solutions for the water crisis that disproportionately affects racialized women and children,鈥� she said.

The UN side event is also reflective of the collaborative research approach found at York, including in water-related fields. The York delegates are members of One WATER, a new Organized Research Unit, as well as the Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research, and CIFAL York, a UN training arm. In addition to Sharma, they include:

• Satinder Brar, professor, Lassonde School of Engineering
• Marina Freire Gormaly, assistant professor, Lassonde School of Engineering
• Ellie Perkins, professor, Faculty of Environmental & Urban Change
• Mary Bunch, associate professor, School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design
• Susan Rogers Van Katwyk, adjunct professor and managing director, Global Strategy Lab
• Jessica Keeshig-Martin, PhD student, Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies
• Hibaq Gelle, MA student, Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies

The delegation will be joined at the conference by 快播视频 President and Vice-Chancellor Rhonda Lenton and Vice-President Research and Innovation Amir Asif. While in New York, the pair will meet with UN and government officials, global partners, and others, to discuss 快播视频鈥檚 leadership in water research and sustainability initiatives.

The trip to the UN Water Conference comes on the heels of the release of York鈥檚 Microlecture Series in Sustainable Living, SDG Week Canada and coincides with Climate Change Research Month at the University.

York delegation鈥檚 panel, called Water Security, Disasters, and Resilience in a Changing Climate: Challenges, Opportunities, and Solutions, takes place on March 24. The , co-hosted by the governments of Tajikistan and the Netherlands, takes place March 22 to 24.

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When plants are healthy, they emit red light that is nearly impossible to see with the naked eye, but with a new instrument developed at 快播视频, it's now possible to measure that light whether in a lab or out in the field.

Although it may sound like science fiction to say healthy plants glow, this delayed fluorescence comes from light absorbed from the sun, related to photosynthetic activity and health of the plant. Plants emit this glow after they absorb a flash of light.

"We can tell how healthy the plant is by the robustness of the red light they emit. The weaker the light gets, the less healthy the plant is," says Associate Professor of biophysics of York's Faculty of Science. "You can't always tell the health of the plant just by looking at it. Often, it will look green and healthy until you test it."

That's where the new, highly sensitive and portable biosensor Mermut and York chemistry Professor William Pietro engineered comes in. "We developed a device that can capture low intensity light emission from plants," says Pietro.

The tool, a SiPM (solid-state silicon photomultiplier) -enabled portable delayed fluorescence photon counting device with integrated plug-and-play excitation of a simple LED, can easily be deployed remotely. This enables the device to help measure the health and sustainability of plants, especially those stressed by CO2 emissions, greenhouse gases and extreme weather events, and asses impacts of industrialization. Not only can it be used in a lab but, as it's the size of a briefcase, it can be easily carried from site to site, whether that's crops in Saskatchewan, where Mermut hails from, protected Indigenous lands across Canada, or the rainforests of Brazil.

"The results of this can tell us about the reaction of plants under various environmental conditions, including drought, heat and cold shock stress or after floods. It does this in a powerful new way that enables us to study this phenomenon of plant emission directly in the field. It's so sensitive it can count individual photons, particles of light, emitted from plants," says Pietro.

This wouldn't have been possible even a few years ago. The technology was too large, not portable in the least, complicated, and expensive, all of which precluded field-based studies, until now. Mermut and Pietro are hoping other researchers will also start using the instrument in their studies, perhaps to study impacts of climate change over time on plants.

In the future, they hope to mount the equipment on a drone so it can fly over rainforests, conservation areas and agricultural fields 鈥� which may help farmers address food security 鈥� to gauge their health and how it changes over time or in reaction to environmental stressors.

"This is so important because roughly 20 per cent of oxygen is produced by the Brazilian rain forests," says Mermut, who has experience in creating remotely deployable medical devices for global health applications and space life sciences research. "You can imagine how useful such technology may become in the future, not only for plants, but for humans as well."

The researchers published their proof-of-concept study, in a special issue of the journal .

Already, they are teaching students in the Biophysics undergraduate program in the Department of Physics and Astronomy about the concepts and how to use the research equipment in the , where they can simulate the stresses found in nature in greenhouses, to see the effects on various plants.

It鈥檚 an example of how cutting-edge research is not only being used right away in the classroom, but also out in the field.

PHOTOS: Biosensor 鈥� /news/wp-content/uploads/sites/242/2022/11/IMG_8166-scaled.jpg

Prototypes of the conceptual implementation of the device on a drone used to study and survey fields and forests: /news/wp-content/uploads/sites/242/2022/11/Drone2.jpg, /news/wp-content/uploads/sites/242/2022/11/Drone3.jpg and /news/wp-content/uploads/sites/242/2022/11/Drone4.jpg

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