My research is on water quality and quantity issues, and specifically how humans are impacting these important resources. Key questions that I am interested in are:

1. How will future climate warming impact water resources?
2. How has anthropogenic pollution affected “pristine” alpine and arctic lakes?
3. Can climate and pollution synergistically impact water resources?

In order to look at these questions I use paleolimnological techniques, which provide me with long term (100s to 1000s of years) records of changes in water quality and quantity. Paleolimnology uses fossils and geochemical signals preserved in lake and river sediments (mud) to infer environmental change. Presently, I have four main research projects ongoing:

1. Determining long term records of drought in the western United States using alpine lake sediments;
2. Determining environmental change for the last 10,000 years from sediments from lakes and small ponds on Victoria Island in the Canadian Arctic;
3. Determining long term records of environmental change in the Canadian Rockies and
4. Looking at changes in water quality and quantity in southwestern Ontario