#currentstudent

Lauren Yee is a graduate student working with Dr. Colin Roberton in the Spatial Lab. This past June, she has attended an interesting workshop/field school in Montreal, Quebec for CoPEH Canada (Canadian Community of Practice in Ecosystem approaches to health).

In Montreal, graduate students, professionals and scholars came together to address the issues associated with the St. Lawrence River from a transdisciplinary and EcoHealth approach. Each day was filled with lectures, activities and collaborative work within small groups.

The whole concept of EcoHealth derives from the fact that most problems we face (especially in the realm of geography and environmental science) are extremely complex in nature. An EcoHealth approach attempts to understand or realize these complexities to a problem and address them. From CoPEH Canada’s website: “These approaches also encourage social and gender equity and participation, recognizing that improving health and well being requires sharing and exchange of different kinds of knowledge in order to enhance both integration and action.”

Lauren's thesis is focused on the determinants of wildlife health and disease, and of healthy ecosystems. She asks: what could serve as early indicators of disease to find gaps in existing surveillance data, and where should surveillance take place in Canada? Lauren's thesis relies on GIS, remote sensing, and programming. She is also working on a web-scraping project this summer that will compare alternative sources of information (blogs, mailing lists, local conservation authorities, etc) to more authoritative sources on wildlife health. Lauren's interests made her the perfect candidate for the CoPEH Canada workshop/field school in Montreal.

~ Above: “old port in Montreal” 

~ Above: “The boat ride to Lac Pierre.  The significance of Lake Saint-Pierre is that Lake Saint-Pierre as its part of the St. Lawrence seaway and has been dredged  to accommodate all the fishery and trade traffic. The wave action from all the boat traffic, recreational and leisurely, has eroded significant portions of the shoreline and protected areas. It's an area that has been polluted by effluents from industry as well as municipal waste. . It's also recognized as a nature reserve for migrating waterfowl. It's a very important area for nesting herons. It is prone to natural flooding so many houses are built on "stilts".

Below is a link to a song Lauren made for the course, which requires students to create an artistic representation of what they learned about EcoHealth and how it reflects on their research.

~ SONG --> https://soundcloud.com/laurenyee/nature-vs-industry

Throughout her experience in Montreal, the most meaningful was learning from peers from across the globe, from as far away as Africa and South America, and from elsewhere in Canada, coast to coast. As well as renewed confidence in herself, she came back with new ideas and methods she can use in her research (although she's already missing the culture of Montreal and the connections she made).

Hello, I am the social media coordinator for the Geography and Environmental Studies Department, which means I am the face behind this page and the other accounts along with Dr. Robert McLeman.

I will be in 2nd year of the Honors Geography program as of fall.

So far, I have taken all the first year geography and environmental studies courses, (excluding the geology courses) plus I recently completed GG290/ES290 and GG271 online. It is hard to pick a favourite course because I find them all genuinely interesting. ‘GG102: Introduction to Human Geography’ is a course that I did not know what to expect from when originally going into it. The analyzing of how/how fast the human population is expanding around the campus, the reconstruction project in downtown Kitchener, the use of mapping technology and the concept of food miles opened my eyes to a whole other part of geography that I found intriguing. GG102 made me want to reconsider my food choices because the concept of food miles are highly contributing to environmental problems, which are analyzed more in ‘ES102: Introduction to Environmental Problems’, which is another course of interest.

An interest of mine is bike riding. The mill run trail in Cambridge is my go-to trail for when I just want to get out of the house for an hour. My goal distance to bike by the end of the summer is 150km in a day because I found out about the biking to end MS event and I would like to be involved in/with that next year. I did around 85km a week ago with a friend from Cambridge to Brantford, which was exciting.